The Development of a Workshop for Cultivating Leaders of Mathematics-Grounding Activities in Class

Teacher professional development (TPD) is an important topic for school teaching and learning, but the challenging part is how to design quality and sustainable TPD that results in sound teachers’ learning. This research paper presents a cascade model of TPD used by the Just Do Math project and designed to nurture any number of teachers to teach mathematics in a more student-centered approach, rather than teaching mathematics in an inflexible way. The one-day workshop for cultivating leaders of mathematics-grounding activities in class (MGA-in-class), discussed in this article, is built on our previous TPD cascade model of scaling up the cultivation of designers, leaders, and teachers of mathematics-grounding activities for camps (MGA-for-camp). This paper focuses on presenting the process of developing and evaluating the one-day workshop for leaders of MGA-in-class. The development includes the processes of (1) how to transform activities designed for use in special camps to activities for use in regular classes, (2) how to cultivate the designers of MGA-in-class to be the facilitators in the one-day workshop for leaders of MGA-in-class, and (3) how to organize and evaluate the one-day workshop. Though the evidence shows that the one-day workshop has not recruited as many participants as previous TPD, the collected evidence provides useful information for future adjustment.