2006 TPC PI Conference Highlights
The second annual Teacher Professional Continuum (TPC) PI Conference in May drew some 200 attendees to discuss issues of importance to teacher professionalism, even as they learned that the TPC program will cease to be a separate program at NSF as of this fall. The three-day event, held May 7-9, 2006, at the Hyatt Regency in Reston, Virginia, offered a mix of plenary, small-group, and poster sessions. Participants included principal investigators, project staff, program evaluators, and NSF program officers.
Michael Haney, lead program director in NSF’s ESIE division, officially opened the conference on May 7 with a report on the status of the TPC program. The existing TPC, CLT (Centers for Learning and Teaching) and IMD (Instructional Materials Development) programs will be combined within the new Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings (DRL) at NSF, he said. The merger of those three programs will, according to NSF’s budget request for 2007, “increase flexibility and agility, focus the resources needed to address acknowledged Grand Challenges in K-12 STEM education, and encourage innovative thinking from the field.”
Earlier, new TPC PIs were welcomed with a pre-session led by Robert Sherwood of NSF that addressed the basics of leading a TPC project and interacting with NSF staff members. In addition, all attendees had the opportunity to select from three other pre-sessions: special interest group meetings on data collection instruments; evaluation strategies; and piloting, field testing and other testing of resource materials.
On the second day of the conference, Hilda Borko of the University of Colorado at Boulder presented her work on professional development and teacher learning. She discussed her current research on the STAAR project (Supporting the Transition from Arithmetic to Algebraic Reasoning.) Following Borko’s talk, small, facilitated sessions allowed participants to reflect on her work in light of their particular interest areas: research, materials development or scaling up.
Richard Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania and the Consortium for Policy Research in Education presented on the last day of the conference, asking the question: Is there really a shortage of mathematics and science teachers? In discussing his analysis of the U.S. Department of Education’s Schools and Staffing Survey and the Teacher Follow-up Survey, he argued that the issue is not a shortage of teachers requiring attention to recruitment, but rather an issue of turnover, which demands attention to teacher retention. Federal data indicate that among teachers who said they were changing jobs or quitting due to “dissatisfaction,” math and science teachers were more likely than all teachers taken together to give as reasons poor salary, poor administrative support, student discipline, and poor student motivation.
Throughout the conference, small-group discussions permitted attendees the chance to meet around specific topics of interest to them. Roundtable sessions covered topics ranging from curriculum-specific research and support to teacher induction and Web- and video-based resources and tools. Other concurrent sessions covered such issues as “How Can We Prepare Teachers to Close Student Achievement Gaps?” and “What Teacher Professional Development Research Should NSF Support?” Meanwhile, poster sessions provided new and returning TPC project staff the opportunity to present their work and to mingle informally with other TPC participants.
View the conference agenda and associated resources. The formal conference proceedings are posted on the WebBoard.
