Mountaineer Mathematics Master Teachers: A Networked Improvement Community Building Capacity for Mathematics Teacher Leadership in West Virginia

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This Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program Capacity Building project is meant to lay the foundation for a secondary mathematics teacher leader pipeline in West Virginia. West Virginia experiences particularly prominent challenges with entrenched poverty, economic stagnation, and low educational attainment and faces lagging student achievement in mathematics due at least in part to a state-wide shortage of highly-qualified mathematics teachers. At the same time the state's cultural richness and strong community networks make for a unique context for research and improvement efforts around mathematics teaching and learning. The overall goal of the principal investigators (PIs) is to address the lack of advanced teacher development opportunities and teacher leadership roles in the state by having stakeholders come together to clarify the need for mathematics teacher leaders, collectively brainstorm the formal roles teacher leaders could play in improvement at all levels, and define the ways to best prepare and support teacher leaders for work in rural, Appalachian contexts. These efforts will inform the design of a Master's program in secondary mathematics education, currently lacking in the state, focused on developing mathematics teacher leaders. By creating a blueprint for a professional mathematics teaching pipeline from skilled educator to teacher leader without removing the most effective teachers from the classroom, this project aims to improve mathematics teaching and learning across the state which in turn may result in more West Virginia students seeking STEM degrees and entering STEM careers.Using Networked Improvement Communities (NIC) methodology, this partnership between West Virginia University and Pocahontas County Schools, with contributions from the West Virginia Department of Education and a managing researcher from the American Institutes for Research, the PIs aim to address the pathways and possibilities for mathematics teacher leadership in the state. The project team plans to focus on the Chartering Phase of a NIC, which entails developing a deep understanding of the problem, the system that produces it, and a theory of improvement that articulates a set of aims and actions for collectively addressing the problem. Feedback from stakeholders and data on student and teacher demographics, student achievement, and teacher qualifications will inform these efforts. A Chartering meeting will involve project staff, higher education faculty, state education leaders, district and school administrators, teacher leaders, and classroom teachers from across the state, and be facilitated by a skilled education research consultant. The meeting should serve as an opportunity to engage multiple siloed stakeholders in collectively defining a complex problem and coalescing around a theory of action. Implementation of these improvement efforts will be carefully documented and analyzed to produce recommendations for fostering and supporting mathematics teacher leadership in rural contexts which the project team intends to broadly disseminate through national organizations and scholarly and practitioner publications.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.