About the Session

Advancing Quality Teaching: Professional Development in a Networked Improvement Community of Postsecondary Math Educators

Mathematics is the primary obstacle to college completion in US institutions of higher education. Over 60% of incoming community college students are required to take at least one remedial math course before they can enroll in college-credit courses. Eighty percent of those students do not complete any college-level math course within 3 years and are therefore unable to obtain a degree or credential or to transfer. In comprehensive 4-year institutions, about 20% of incoming students are placed into remedial math and about 60% do not complete a college-level math course within 2 years, significantly decreasing their likelihood of graduation.

The Carnegie Math Pathways Networked Improvement Community (NIC) of over 90 IHE’s is aimed at dramatically improving these outcomes. A NIC brings together the tools and processes of improvement science with the learning structures of networks to enable a community of stakeholders to achieve a shared goal. This approach is explicitly designed to accelerate learning-by-doing and knowledge sharing to develop evidence-based solutions and generate the know-how needed for those ideas to be effectively implemented at scale across contexts.

This presentation will focus on Advancing Quality Teaching, an NSF-funded project that aimed to use networked improvement methods to develop and continuously improve professional learning opportunities for instructors in the Carnegie Math Pathways NIC. This session will illustrate how our community applied improvement methods to the problem of improving instructional practice and course outcomes, highlighting challenges we faced in the design and implementation of professional learning at scale, and lessons learned about doing networked improvement in the messy real world.