Bridging the Gap Between Content Knowledge and Practice: Improving Middle School Teachers' Content Knowledge and Classroom Practices

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This three-year project focuses on scaling up the SimCalc project and emphasizes bridging mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT) on proportional reasoning and argumentation as part of teachers' classroom practices. The preliminary findings from the SimCalc project suggest that the increase in teachers' content knowledge without explicit instruction in teaching strategies did not lead teachers to change their approach to supporting student reasoning. The current study is exploratory and will test the hypothesis that Bridging Professional Development (BPD), professional development that helps to bridge content knowledge and classroom practice, can effect positive teacher change and to understand how BPD can accomplish this. This exploratory study is the first of a larger research agenda; future studies will include a large-scale randomization and another that explores the impact of BPD on student achievement.