Incremental and Innovative Approaches to Professional Development for Mathematics Teachers

Dear Colleagues,

Professional developers and teacher educators have been striving to improve mathematics instruction for decades, but with mixed success. In some countries, robust professional development (PD) structures have been developed or maintained, supporting high-quality mathematics instruction. In other countries, however, there has been an inertia of procedurally focused mathematics instruction that has been incredibly resistant to change. Even when specific PD efforts have found success in certain contexts or with certain teachers, it has been difficult for these instructional improvements to be sustained or spread on a broad scale. Moreover, as further theoretical advancements are made with regard to the potential of mathematics instruction, such as instruction for human flourishing or to promote social justice, it is even more important to discern ways to effectively promote and sustain instructional change through PD efforts.

In this Special Issue on professional development for mathematics teachers, we are seeking articles that present innovative approaches to affecting instructional change. These articles might focus on professional development efforts or infrastructures that have found success in certain national contexts and present considerations or an investigation of how it might extend to other national contexts. Articles might also focus on new ideas for or forms of professional development, based on the recognition that past efforts with mathematics teachers have not consistently led to widespread change.

One particular idea of interest for this Special Issue is incremental PD, defined in contrast to transformational PD. Transformational PD seeks to present mathematics teachers with an alternative model of instruction or to train them in ambitious practices that are substantially divergent from their conventional teaching, but it faces the challenges of being distinct from teachers’ (and students’) past experiences, difficult to enact, unaligned with many conventional textbooks and assessments, and sometimes susceptible to public and political pushback. Incremental PD, on the other hand, is based on the goal of providing only modest suggestions for improvement, with instructional “nudges” that are proximal to what teachers are already doing and so have a high likelihood of uptake (and minimal likelihood of pushback), but which will meaningfully improve instruction in some way, such as by increasing student engagement, conceptual considerations, or equitable participation. Articles hypothesizing incremental approaches to PD or reporting on attempts to increase the uptake and viability of otherwise transformational PD efforts are welcome.

In this Special Issue, original research articles, theoretical essays, and literature reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• PD for elementary mathematics instruction;
• PD for secondary mathematics instruction;
• Innovative models for mathematics teacher PD;
• Incremental PD in mathematics;
• Theories of teacher change that relate directly to mathematics instruction;
• Theories of instructional change that relate directly to mathematics.

We look forward to receiving your contributions. 

Dr. Samuel Otten
Dr. Amber Candela
Dr. Zandra De Araujo
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• mathematics teacher professional development
• mathematics education
• teacher education
• theories of teacher change
• instructional improvement
• instructional change
• teacher learning