It’s one of the most common complaints about teacher professional development: The programming that districts put together doesn’t actually address the instructional challenges that vex teachers the most.
Teachers often feel like the rare time set aside for them to improve their craft isn’t actually designed in a way that will lead to better outcomes for students—in part because administrators who aren’t in the classroom set the PD agenda.
A growing statewide network in West Virginia is hoping to fix this intractable problem.
The Mountaineer Mathematics Master Teachers, or M3T, pays middle and high school math teachers to lead local professional-learning teams across the state. Teachers set the agenda and serve as expert facilitators, zeroing in on the issues that “bug” educators in their classrooms and testing out strategies to address them, said Joanna Burt-Kinderman, one of the network’s project leads.
“That shouldn’t be radical, but that’s what never happens,” she said.
Burt-Kinderman, who was featured as an EdWeek Leader To Learn From in 2019 for her work in math instruction in West Virginia’s Pocahontas County schools, launched the network six years ago with Matthew Campbell, an associate director of the West Virginia University School of Education. There are now 41 math teacher-leaders leading groups of educators across 37 of the state’s 55 county school districts.
In the M3T network, teachers use a continuous improvement framework: making incremental changes, monitoring the results, and then taking action based on the findings.
Change at this scale feels more doable than the system overhauls that other kinds of professional learning might suggest, said Dana Stoll, a math teacher at Brooke Middle School in Brooke County, who participates in the network. “It’s small, manageable things,” she said.
Why teacher collaboration matters
Professional learning that centers teacher collaboration and prioritizes concrete classroom applications isn’t a new idea. Research has long shown that this kind of PD is most effective.
This approach makes PD immediately relevant for teachers, because “this work has been done with the students in this school, in this place,” said Davita Lancelin, the vice president of services at the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching. The group, which was not involved with the West Virginia network, partners with schools to implement teacher-coaching and professional development systems.
But M3T has a broader reach than traditional school- or district-based communities: It connects teachers with others in their subject and grade level across the state. And it takes a more bottom-up approach than some other teacher-leadership models, relying on participants to set their own goals, rather than working from district priorities.
“Everything that we have been testing have been things that we’ve identified in our own classes that students struggle with,” said Karen Keener, a math teacher-leader at Brooke High School in Brooke County. “It’s very tailored to our classes.”
Especially now, getting students to engage in math classes can feel like an uphill battle. “We’ve identified that our students just don’t persevere when they’re struggling,” Keener said.
Study after study has shown that math achievement took a hit during the pandemic. Attitudes toward the subject have shifted over time, too. Not only in the United States, but across the world, teenagers are now more likely to say that math makes them anxious than a decade ago.
And because math is cumulative—students’ ability to master new concepts is often largely dependent on their understanding of foundational ideas—supporting middle and high school students who struggle can be tricky.
Beyond this, West Virginia teachers face some unique challenges, with a growing number of non-certified teachers in math and science classrooms. Average teacher pay in the state was the lowest in the nation in the 2022-23 school year, according to a database compiled by the National Education Association.
In the M3T network, teachers are paid an annual $10,000 stipend for what amounts to about four to five hours of extra duty work a week.
“This is providing people that second job,” Burt-Kinderman said. “This is taking really ambitious folks and trying to incentivize them to stay and help us figure out how everybody can teach math better.”
The project, which had been funded through a time-limited National Science Foundation grant, could become a permanent fixture in some districts. Last year, the West Virginia state legislature passed a bill that will make new funding available to schools to support teacher-leadership networks in math and science.
Though only limited, preliminary data are available on student outcomes, evaluations of the project from WestEd have found that both teachers and administrators felt that it improved math teaching.
And while only about half of all teachers in the state think that professional learning offered through their school or district is valuable, 96 percent of M3T members say their participation in the network meets that bar, according to data from West Virginia University. They’re also more likely to say they want to continue teaching.
“We enjoy our work more, we find value in what we’re doing,” said Elaine Cook, a math teacher-leader at Musselman High School in Berkeley County. “It’s making us stay in the classroom, and we wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
Students struggle with math mindset—but also foundational skills
Despite working in different districts with different student populations, the stickiest problems in teachers’ math classrooms have turned out to be remarkably similar, Burt-Kinderman said.
There are persistent challenges around mindset: getting students to take charge of problem-solving, talk to each other about what they’re struggling with, and engage deeply with the material.
But there are also more discrete, concrete gaps in students’ knowledge. Many haven’t mastered previous grade-level skills, so teachers have to figure out ways to build those lessons into new content—and teach them in a way that will stay with kids as they move on from the class.
At Brooke Middle School, for example, teachers saw that students tended to freeze up when presented with word problems—so they tested a new approach to tackling these questions.
They started to take a deliberate pause, requiring students to jot down what they noticed and wondered about the problem before starting to pull out numbers and begin calculations. The strategy made students more likely to attempt the problem, rather than shut down, said Jami Packer, an 8th grade teacher at the school and a math teacher-leader.
It had other benefits, too.
“Especially at a middle school level, kids are so worried about what their peers think,” she said. Asking students to dissect the problem, rather than immediately asking for an answer, “lowers the bar on correctness,” she said, leading to more participation.
Will better PD lead to better student outcomes?
Still, teachers reported that the strategy didn’t have a significant impact on an important outcome: students’ accuracy in word-problem solving.
It’s not yet clear whether the network has large-scale effects on student scores.
Pass rates on the 8th grade state math test nearly doubled between 2021 and 2023 in schools that participated in the network, compared to slower growth in non-network schools. But Burt-Kinderman is quick to note that other factors—or combinations of them—could be responsible for the higher scores.
For teachers, though, the success is evident in how students operate in the classroom.
Kyle Berry, a math teacher-leader at Barboursville Middle School in Cabell County, focused this year with his cohort on encouraging students to remember and reuse previously learned skills.
While before, most students said on surveys that they didn’t regularly do this in class, Berry now sees evidence of this practice in his classroom daily. Students take pictures of diagrams on the board; they save notes to pull out for later use, he said.
The network is building confidence and self-efficacy, he said—not just for teachers, but for students, too.
