About MCTP

MCTP Status Report, Fall 1996

1. Background and Goals of the Project

Like each of the NSF-funded teacher preparation collaboratives, the Maryland project set out to develop and implement improved programs for preparation of mathematics and science teachers. But the specific goals, structure, and accomplishments of our project reflect several critical decisions that have led us to somewhat different activities and products than the other CETP collaboratives.

new kind of teacher preparation program

Second, we chose to structure our project so that it would bring together science, mathematics, and education faculty in a cohesive statewide program development partnership. That partnership was to develop new kinds of content and pedagogy courses of particular value to our target audience of prospective teachers, but also to have that transformation of teaching influence the science and mathematics education of other undergraduate students as well.

Third, our project design included a significant research effort that would analyze the experiences and growth of our faculty and students and produce generalizable understanding of new approaches to teacher preparation, not simply a short-term, local up-grade of existing programs.

The decision to focus on creating a new teacher preparation program, targeted on upper elementary and middle school grades, reflected our belief that the challenge of reform in science and mathematics education is especially critical at that level and that there is growing support for use of content specialist teachers with interdisciplinary expertise. The decision to work toward a statewide program development partnership reflected our desire to build, for the first time in Maryland, productive collaborations that would reach across traditional institutional and disciplinary boundaries.

2. Specific Program Objectives and Accomplishments

At the outset of our project, in June of 1993, we envisioned development of a teacher preparation program with four major components:

New kinds of content and pedagogy courses would provide strong interdisci-plinary preparation for teaching mathematics and science and would model instruction that reflects constructivist principles of learning.
Science and mathematics internship opportunities would give our prospective teachers genuine experience of research and of ways that science learning can occur in a variety of informal educational settings.
Field experiences in schools with exemplary science and mathematics programs would give students practice teaching under the guidance of specially qualified mentor teachers.
Support for new teachers during their transition from university study to the world of work would provide better continuity at the critical junction of preparation and professional practice.

We believe that we have made significant on-schedule progress toward each of those objectives. The progress can be described in two ways - with numerical indicators of the project's scope and with qualitative indicators of program impact.

3. Quantitative Indicators

As mentioned above, the Maryland Collaborative set goals that are significantly different from those of the typical CETP program. We focused on creation of a new teacher preparation program aimed at the upper elementary and middle grades, and we proposed building a multi-institution collaborative development effort. Both are firsts in the State of Maryland. We planned to take the first 12 months of the Collaborative effort to develop a coherent and broadly shared vision of the new program, with the first teacher candidates and courses beginning in Fall of 1994. As of the fall of 1996, we were about 70% of the way toward our program development and implementation goals and our first teacher candidate recruits are completing their content preparation and approaching the professional education and field experience components of their programs.

In the fall of 1996 we had over 167 students who have been formally accepted into the MCTP program on the various participating campuses, with applications and acceptances increasing almost daily.
Those MCTP majors join other teacher education and liberal arts undergraduate students in specially designed science, mathematics, and pedagogy courses and other courses transformed to reflect an MCTP influence. In the fall 1996 semester nearly 3500 students are enrolled in those courses.
120 higher education faculty and nearly 90 K-12 teachers have been involved in design of content and pedagogy courses, internships, and field experiences under special mentors.
Among officially admitted MCTP students, 19% are African-American and another 4% are from other ethnic groups that are traditionally underrepresented in mathematics and science teaching. Both figures are very close to the targets in our initial proposal.
Among non-MCTP students participating in the courses influenced by our Collaborative, data from Spring 1996 show that 28% were African-American and 13% other minority groups.
The NSF Teaching Scholars funding has been a critical aid in attracting students to our demanding new teacher preparation program. We've used the funds to make 69 awards to outstanding students. Of the 69 awards, 16% have been to African-American students and 3% to students from other traditionally underrepresented minority groups. The average GPA for our teaching scholars has been over 3.5 on a 4.0 scale.
Based on academic standing of current MCTP students, we anticipate 60 graduates in Spring of 1997 and somewhat greater numbers in each succeeding year. The accompanying bar graph reflects one of the conditions that have caused us to modify our original recruiting plans - our realization that first year students are only one of several significant sources for our program. Internal and community college transfer students have proven a very important source of MCTP students.
Various sources of support have augmented NSF funding to make development and implementation of our plans possible. Two items are especially significant. The $198,000 University of Maryland system redeployment grant has supported our very successful internship program. The substantial increase in institutional cost-sharing during year 4 indicates the growing commitment of our participating campuses to support of the faculty development and programmatic thrusts of our project.

The results described above reflect substantial achievement of the goals set in our original proposal and cooperative agreement. However, in assessing the influence of MCTP activities it is also important to keep in mind the fact that the course changes will persist beyond the life of the NSF-funding and each teacher specialist who graduates from our program will influence over 100 students in each year of teaching - a much greater multiplier effect than what can be accomplished by upgrading standard programs for elementary teachers.

In the remaining months of project work we have three main goals - expanding the number of college and university faculty who are part of the MCTP course team, extending the influence of MCTP course ideas to students who are not necessarily preparing to teach, and building bridges to help our graduates with the induction to teaching process.

4. Products and Qualitative Indicators

The raw numbers of students, faculty, and courses give only a superficial picture of the influence that NSF Collaborative funding is having on teacher preparation in the participating Maryland institutions. To understand the impact of our first three and a half years of work you have to look at the products in qualitative terms as well.

Students

When recent reports of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study noted that successful countries tend to teach in ways that have been recommended by reform proposals in this country, one of our MCTP students noted that point and suggested, "We've got to spread the MCTP way of teaching in this country."

Over 30 MCTP students have experienced our research and informal science education internships, and all have commented on the transforming effect of those experiences on their understanding of science. Through participation on research teams at sites like NASA, the University of Maryland Medical School, and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, our prospective teachers have learned that scientific work is something quite different from the orderly process taught in typical school science courses. They have made genuine contributions to their research partnerships, in several cases leading to joint and even lead-author research publications.

The special mentorship program is establishing early and influential connections between outstanding science and mathematics teachers and the MCTP teacher candidates. On a recent Saturday morning MCTP teaching scholars organized a special workshop that saw mentor teachers presenting model science and mathematics lessons and leading discussions of what it takes to make such lessons effective in schools. The students, who organized the meeting themselves, were so excited about the effect that they are already planning a reprise in the Spring semester.

Taken together, the stories of these emerging science and mathematics teachers speak of impressive effects from fundamentally new approaches to teacher preparation in content, pedagogy, and field experiences.

Faculty Development - One of the essential concomitant factors in development of new approaches to teacher preparation is transformation of higher education faculty teaching philosophies and skills in science and mathematics. One of the outstanding successes of the Maryland Collaborative has been formation of a kind of invisible college of faculty from institutions and disciplines that span the institutions of our state. That invisible college stimulates and supports faculty who want to explore fundamental change in their teaching, and the signs of that activity appear regularly on our MCTP faculty list-serv discussions and at the semi-annual statewide course debriefing meetings. In a state where the various public institutions rarely had friendly interchanges at any level, we now have congenial and lively dialog that cuts across scientific disciplines and education as well.

Institutional Effects - To make sure that changes supported by NSF funding remain in place when that funding ends, it is essential that the MCTP innovations become part of the regular programs at participating institutions. That is the case at five of the eight four-year institutions in the Collaborative, including the largest teacher preparation programs at UMCP and Towson State University. Furthermore, as Maryland is engaged in fundamental redesign of teacher preparation at all levels, the Maryland Collaborative program is widely viewed as a prototype of the desired new directions.

Dissemination - To see that the insights gained by our Maryland Collaborative initiatives are of value to other science education and teacher preparation programs, we've engaged in a variety of dissemination activities. We've maintained an actively-visited and award-winning site on the world-wide web, a lively faculty discussion list-serv, and a quarterly newsletter that reaches hundreds of interested people.

To share in more detail the ideas developed and experiences acquired in our efforts to transform content preparation of prospective teachers, we've been preparing an MCTP sampler of background papers and case reports that we expect to publish under the title Constructing Understanding of Mathematics and Science. This publication outlines the instructional and content philosophies underlying our various instructional innovations, strategies for implementation of those ideas, and reports of practical experiences at implementing the MCTP philosophy.

Finally, as mentioned earlier, the MCTP project has conducted a significant line of research on student and faculty development through the activities of the collaborative. Those research studies have been presented in numerous sessions at major national meetings of organizations like NARST, PME, NCTM, and AERA. Papers have been submitted to leading science and mathematics education journals.

5. Project Evaluation

The activities of our Collaborative have been evaluated each year by our national visiting committee, the SRI team, and NSF program officers. But, on a day-to-day basis, the evaluation that most shapes the PI's decisions about activities of the project is provided by our internal evaluation team led by Gilbert Austin.

6. Conclusion

In summary, we believe that in less than three years since our original NSF funding we've been able to move a long way toward our goal of building an effective collaborative and an important new kind of teacher preparation program for Maryland. We are enthusiastic about our prospects for successful work on the important tasks that remain to build permanent support for the new program.

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