Zandra de Araujo: Alright, welcome, welcome!

Nice to see lots of familiar faces in the chat, or names, I guess. I don’t really see faces, but if you want to introduce yourself in the chat so people know who are in the room, I see folks from, non-profits, and I see people from districts, so great to see you all.

I’m gonna give it just a minute, and then we’ll get started. We will be using the chat. If you have any questions, I’ll keep an eye on it, so just let us know if any questions arise.

And I’ll give it just one minute. It looks like some of you are joining from another meeting that we were just on, so welcome here.

Thanks, Tracy, for kicking us off in the chat, sharing where you’re from, if you’re willing.

Awesome.

Great, great, thanks, Deborah, also.

Okay, so, I’ll kick us off. Hi, my name is Zandra De Araujo, I’m the Director of Mathematics at the Lassinger Center for Learning, and on the call today, we also have Hope Miller, who is providing technical assistance and also helping with our comms on this event, Amy Strickland, who many of you know is our partnerships person for mathematics at the Center, and, Dr. Engledowl, who will introduce himself shortly.

He is the main author of the brief, so you’ll hear a lot from him. Unfortunately, Kayla Sutcliffe, she was instrumental in finding, developing these findings in the briefs, and also the PowerPoints, but she came down with strep throat, so make sure that you take your vitamin C and stay healthy, because something’s going around, at least in Alachua County, it seems.

But we’re happy to share today. This is going to be a brief webinar because it’s about two briefs that we recently completed at the Center, and our goal was to look at strengthening math in Florida through professional learning, so really to get a landscape of professional learning across the state of Florida.

So, Chris, if you want to go forward.

So the reason we’re here is we, as you’re gonna hear, went across the state of Florida. We did some more listening. A number of you were very key to our first listening tour. This is kind of an offshoot and extension of it. We really wanted to understand what is happening in professional learning across the state of Florida, particularly in relation to HQIM, which is high-quality instructional materials, as we were able to, dig into that. 

So I’m gonna hand off to Chris, and he’s gonna give a bunch of overview of these briefs.

This will be recorded, we will put it on the web, and also we will link to the briefs and the full landscape analysis, and I’ll chime in, but Chris, I’m gonna hand it over to you.

Chris Engledowl: Thank you, sounds good.

I am Chris Engledowl, I’m a research scientist at the Center. I am a former high school math teacher, and my PhD is in Math Ed, so this is all very near and dear to my heart. I care about math teaching and learning very deeply. So, to start off and sort of give you an idea of how we got here, back in 2023, we did a listening tour that was sort of broad, looking at the systematic challenges that exist across the state in relation to math education generally. So it was not focused specifically on professional learning.

And, we found three things that were sort of barriers. One of them, very obviously, funding. Also student math achievement and trying to understand how to impact that in a systematic way. And then, there’s also a problem with teacher capacity and also teacher production.

Additionally, some sort of highlights that we found from that were that there was alignment across our stakeholder groups, which included both people who were in the education system and people outside of it, including business leaders.

But there was alignment on what the most valuable math skills were, which aligned heavily with the math thinking and reasoning standards. There was also a lot of motivation among people to make policy changes.

And, we saw a lot of conversation and topics around math professional learning, and that it was in high demand, but we didn’t dig deep into what that meant.

So. That’s where the Spring 2026 tour was born, to think about what is the state of Math PL across the state.

So the big question was, like, what are the current Math-specific professional learning opportunities, the needs and the systems gaps in the state?

The scope was broad. We talked to people in focus groups. We had 182 participants there. We have respondents from 988 people, and this included, collectively, 69 different school districts across 60 counties in the state of Florida. So, and if we break that out by the focus groups, of course, there’s fewer people, so there’s a little bit less coverage, but we have about two-thirds of the state covered in terms of districts and counties.

And those people that we talk to and that we have responses from include teachers, coaches, principals and district admin within the system. And district admin includes people like Math specialists, or curriculum and instruction directors and district-level coaches.

There’s also private professional learning providers, we talked to people in the nonprofit providing space and then also higher ed faculty. So, it really was a broad range, and we were trying to cover all the people who are either receiving PL, who are providing it or who are making decisions about it.

So, to give you a sort of top-level view before we dig in, first, what did we learn? These fall into three major buckets that we can talk about, and the reports and the briefs dig in a lot deeper than this.

But, the first one is relevance. So, teachers really want learning that’s grounded in classroom practice. They’re looking for that sort of way to improve their math teaching and learning. The second is around access and quality.

Where we really found that the shared vision requires both the structures and the people to sustain it, and then this maybe more nebulous idea of a disconnect, but as you’ll see here as we talk about this, PL decisions are largely top-down, and that can create a disconnect in a shared vision, resources and capacity. So we’re going to dig in deep into all these things and unpack it a little bit.

So, thinking about the relevance bucket.

We found that teachers really want PL that improves their practice. And we see this in two different ways. One of them is when teachers were talking or reporting about what they currently experience in math-specific PL.

And then also what they desire to experience.

And so the three that they’re getting a lot of right now are things that are standards-focused, curriculum-focused and data-focused. And while that’s really important, they also really want to see these other things, and they describe that as math-specific, which, you know, the standards-focused, curriculum-focused and data-focused, those are math-specific as well, but what they really mean is things that are relevant to the topics that they’re teaching.

And the pedagogy that surrounds that. 

They wanted to see something that was collaborative and practice-based, that was sustained over time and that included follow-up support. And this quote from an elementary teacher sort of highlights the general trend that we saw.

And they said, “I know how to use a standard and read it. When I think of PL, I want to better my teaching, so recognizing the value in the standards and curriculum focus and data-focused sorts of PL, but then once you’ve got that. like, what’s next? Where can I go deeper?”

Moving to the access and quality bucket, teachers really want more opportunities for the Math-specific PL, but just increasing the number of opportunities or offerings isn’t going to necessarily solve that problem. So the access does remain an issue, though. 

One in four teachers in our survey reported receiving five hours or less of Math-specific PL per year.

And that gives us a sense of, sort of, what the limited opportunity is to engage in this kind of learning that is math-specific. Also, it’s important to recognize that, from our conversations with teachers, as well as, from things that we saw in some open response items, like, there’s a gap in between what teachers experience for math and what teachers experience for literacy.

They’re telling us they’re not receiving the same amount of attention, so that five hours or less is highly likely to be less than what they would receive for literacy.

Also, perhaps more challenging here is that half of the teachers said that the PL that they get that is required or suggested by their district was difficult to adapt or implement in the classroom. And then, perhaps even more shockingly, 85% reported receiving no expert feedback after their PL experiences. 

So teachers may attend a PL, and then they return to their classroom, but without someone there to help them understand how to do that, or to talk through challenges with, they don’t know how to implement it, and then, they also have no feedback loop in order to figure out how to improve and refine it.

So, access needs to come with this high-quality learning experience and support for that implementation.

The last bucket is this idea of disconnect. So first, PL decision-making is largely top-down.

A huge commonality that we saw was a difference in who has a voice. So, across our admin focus groups, for instance, all of them described themselves as having a large role in PL decisions.

This is not shocking, and it shouldn’t be something that is a negative thing. They should have that kind of significant role, and they should be helping establish the priorities and coherence, but it raises an important question around how do we create that coherent vision while drawing on the expertise of the people who are closest to the implementation?

Because we also saw that the coaches, when we talked to them, only 44% told us in those focus groups that they had influence over the decisions, and then when we drill down to the teacher level, it drops to 31% who said they have input into their PL options.

So, it becomes important that we look at what teachers said about the PL they actually experience.

And this district coach sort of captured that in this quote, that “PL decisions have been totally from the top down. We’re told from above what we’re going to be doing the next year.” So, the point is really about the alignment of these things.

Still within that disconnect bucket, a shared instructional vision can get lost between decision and implementation, sort of building on this idea. So one challenge we heard is that even when districts are working toward that shared instructional vision, it gets lost between deciding what the PL should be and what teachers actually experience. And we know that that shared instructional vision is a really important feature of high-quality professional learning.

So, we see that disconnect here. In our survey, 60% of people who described themselves as making decisions about professional learning, and were combining here the coaches and the administrators, said that there was alignment in the PL they were making decisions about to the school or district goals.

By contrast, when we asked coaches who were said they were implementing it, it drops to 40%, and teachers who are participating in it, it drops to 30%. So the closer we get to the classroom, the less consistently that alignment is being experienced or perceived. And a quote that sort of captures this really well is larger than what the one is on the screen here, so I’m going to read it.

This person is a district executive director of strategic initiatives. They said, we have a pretty aligned and intentional focus for PL, and so we try to make sure that within a year, within a couple of years, we’re not just throwing things out there and just kind of grabbing anything we can get, right?

We know where we want to focus, and we try to be really intentional. And this sort of captures the intentionality with those that decide what PL and how from this data, it doesn’t seem to translate down through the ranks. So really trying to make sure that that alignment and the coherence is there.

And then, also still within that bucket, we see that even strong PL can’t sustain itself without coaches and capacity. So even when the PL experience is strong, it’s difficult to sustain it without these support networks in place.

So, this came through really clearly in our conversations with teachers, coaches, and administrators. The coaches and administrators described time and competing priorities as the biggest barriers to that kind of ongoing support that the teachers need.

And then teachers reported a lack of follow-up was a significant constraint in the effectiveness of the professional learning, and they wish they had someone to reach out to. So, when coaches and admin described features of past effective professional learning, we asked them what’s worked in the past.

The follow-up and support was one of the most frequently mentioned features, and among teachers, it was one of the most desired features. So there’s this disconnect of coaches saying, yeah, this is what has worked when we’ve done it. It’s the best thing that we can do, and teachers are saying, I want that thing. So there is alignment in what this should look and feel like.

But it’s difficult, because implementation isn’t just a one-time event. Teachers need those opportunities to try something in their classroom, see how it works, receive feedback, refine their practice. So when we talk about capacity, we’re not just, like, saying, get a coach on staff.

What we’re talking about is whether coaches and the instructional leaders actually have the time, the structures and the space to provide that support. It’s an important distinction that districts may already have people and structures intended to support PL, but these competing responsibilities can sometimes limit their ability to do it.

So, moving into recommendations, these findings point us toward these four big recommendations that we have.

One is prioritizing job-embedded professional learning. So, educators consistently emphasize that they want learning that’s relevant to the work they’re doing with students and that they can apply with their own instructional context. That means going beyond just isolated learning experiences toward opportunities connected to teachers’ curriculum, their standards and their day-to-day practice.

Reimagining existing structures is another recommendation, and this is about expanding access not necessarily needing to create entire new systems.

These things are opportunities to rethink how the existing professional learning time, or collaborative structures, or the resources that you have available in your district are being used, so educators have greater access to those learning, and they can build a more coherent structural vision and capacity that sustains it.

The third one is investing in math coaching. Our findings suggested that coaches play a really important role in bridging between professional learning and classroom implementation, so strengthening coaching capacity provides teachers with that follow-up, the feedback, the collaboration and that ongoing support, and that’s difficult to achieve through a one-time PL.

And then the last one is expanding access and vision through partnership.

No single organization has to do all of this independently, nor should they. Partnerships among the state, among districts and universities, external PL providers can expand access to high-quality, math-specific PL, while also helping the districts connect those opportunities to their local instructional visions.

So, the larger message here is that access to high-quality PL and the capacity to sustain that learning have to be addressed together.

I also want to take a moment to point out that these recommendations and the things that we’re talking about that are both things that people have said are effective in our data, and that they desired to receive in a PL, are things that are research-backed, research-based and evidence-based.

You can see that down here in the bottom, there is a link to one piece of research that could be helpful if you want to dig in a little deeper about the research that sort of underlines all this.

Okay, so digging into each recommendation a little bit here, number one, prioritizing job-embedded PL. A lot of teachers mentioned that they really wanted to see the PL modeled so they can understand how it looks and get a clear buy-in.

So the question becomes, like, how can PL become more math-specific and job-embedded?

And one way to do that is to sort of go through this series of things. So one is to ground it, really start with the content, the standards, the instructional materials and local needs, ground it in their practice.

Then model it by making those effective instructional practices visible to the teachers. Give them a chance to apply it in authentic classroom tasks, analyzing student work, reflection and then supporting that by following implementation with coaching and expert feedback.

Coaches, admin, university faculty and external providers also similarly emphasize that meaningful instructional improvement occurs through sustained learning experiences that include implementation, reflection, and follow-up support over one-time workshops.

Number two was reimagining existing structures. So, PL decision making is concentrated among administrators, with fewer opportunities for coaches and teachers to shape those decisions, and one way districts can broaden that voice is by creating more intentional roles for both the coaches and the teacher leaders to shape and facilitate the PL. 

Our participants across the board highlighted the value of learning from colleagues and a lack of coaching, suggesting that teacher leaders can play an important role by facilitating discussions, modeling effective instruction, and sharing classroom examples. 

For instance, here’s what it could look like. So rather than offering a single district-wide session on math discourse, districts could organize a series of short, grade-level learning sessions through a semester, in which teachers learn one strategy, implement it with their students, analyze student work with their peers, identify patterns and misconceptions and then discuss how instructional materials could be adapted in response to that.

And then observe a demonstration lesson from a coach or a teacher leader, and then refine their practice before progressing to the next topic. And that could be done through existing PLC time, planning time, early release days, or district PL days that are sort of spread out based on whatever structure is available to the district.

The third recommendation is to invest in math coaching. Coaches really need a specialized expertise in order to be an effective instructional coach and implement this kind of PL. So it’s important to highlight that as you’re thinking about how you invest in that and invest in your coaches that you have on staff.

Because limited coaching capacity was one of the most consistent barriers across stakeholder groups, and as we saw earlier, they have limited decision-making power compared to administrators. 

So, coaches and administrators both described substantial variation in access to instructional coaching across districts, and teachers repeatedly said that ongoing coaching and classroom-based feedback was one of their greatest needs.

So, it’s important to use the coach expertise to create that shared instructional vision, and to double down on this idea of modeling, supporting, giving feedback and then scaling it.

And then the final recommendation is expanding access and vision through partnership.

Because teachers largely participate in PL that’s required or recommended by their districts, they’re rarely going outside of that to find things on their own.

State-supported opportunities are an important avenue for educators to pursue additional learning while remaining aligned with state priorities. State-supported opportunities can reduce financial burdens while expanding access to evidence-based PL beyond what the individual districts are able to provide. And these should complement district priorities by allowing teachers to pursue targeted learning aligned with their grade level, their content area and their instructional needs, while grounding themselves in the standards and in their instructional materials.

And those should incorporate features that teachers consistently identified as most valuable, such as collaboration, immediate classroom applicability, modeled instructional practices, sustained learning over time and opportunities for implementation and feedback. 

And one example of that is our Math Matrix that provides that state-supported, no-cost, math-specific PL that districts can leverage alongside their local priorities.

So, sort of stepping back.

In order to create an environment for this sustained Math PL, you really need all of these components working together.

It’s not a single offering, it’s a coordinated system for this continuous learning that includes partnership, job-embedded learning, stage structures and math coaching.

High-quality PL is not just about providing a good learning opportunity, it’s about building the conditions that allow that learning to reach classrooms and continue over time. Districts and PL providers can help build the conditions that move learning into classrooms to help sustain that over time.

Thank you. Here is a link to our full report, as well as the two briefs that focus on particular topics. We hope that you find those useful, and let’s open it up for some questions?

Zandra de Araujo: Thanks very much, Chris. Yeah, if you have any questions, just put them in the chat, and we will answer them. We have lots of data, and this was the main points for you.

Thank you.

And, we do encourage you to check out the Ripple report that Chris mentioned, that is also about professional learning, and another good resource in this subject area.

We know professional learning is going to be a hot topic with the new adoption of standards, so hopefully if you all are district folks or involved with professional learning, you share this widely, because we know as we adopt new curriculum, it’s going to be a great opportunity to provide some high-quality professional learning, so keeping these recommendations in mind might be helpful in that area.

Yeah, Evan, I don’t know if we can unmute you, I don’t know how, let’s see.

You should be able to unmute, maybe, if not.

Evan Bonney: There it is. Well, yeah, I’ll keep myself off video. But thank you so much, Chris.  Thank you so much for the way that you presented this to us in terms of the recommendations that you identified. And I’m really curious about recommendation four, which is about partnerships in particular.

Did you come across anyone who said that, “oh, it’d be really great to partner with, for example, a local business in the community?” Maybe that’s a bit outside of what, the realm of what you were working on, but I was just kind of curious if anybody recognized, you know, the aspects about pedagogy, not being necessarily aligned, or maybe them feeling as if it wasn’t necessarily aligned with, greater need within the community or whatnot. Thank you.

Zandra de Araujo: Thank you.

Chris Engledowl: Yeah, thanks. So, our questions probably didn’t lend themselves well to talking about that. However, that came up a lot in their 2023 listening tour. And there was desire for collaboration around trying to figure out how to make math relevant and sort of create this connection between school-based math and career-based math. So if you want to know more about that, there’s actually quite a lot in that report about that, which is also on our website.

I don’t think I really answered your question. It was sort of like a non-answer, but…

Zandra de Araujo: I mean, like, to my knowledge, it didn’t come up much here, and honestly, Evan, I don’t think that, like, first of top of mind is often industry and companies and how we can partner within education across those areas.

I wonder if, with the proliferation of new technologies like AI and stuff, if that might broaden, kind of, the use cases and the applicability of those things. The prior listening tour, as Chris mentioned, did come up more, but I do think that there is a need to understand how math is used in the real world, because as we know, if you’re trained as a teacher, as I was.

And other folks on this call, it’s hard to know how math… I don’t know how nurses use math, even. My sister’s a nurse, right? So, like, understanding how different industries use mathematics in a meaningful and real way is increasingly important, and more engaging for kids, for sure. So, hopefully we can explore that further in the future.

Matt, let me see if that’ll take you off mute?

Matt Minnick: It did.

Thank you. Appreciate the presentation, and looking forward to, you know, digging in on the specifics more. On the professional learning side, I saw your answer to the one in four stat. 

Was it that, I think it said five or less hours, is that correct? 

It sounds like, if I’m hearing you correctly, they just weren’t given a choice over what they would be receiving professional learning about, and when they went back and looked, it totaled up to less than five hours, as opposed to, something they were opting into, or choosing, like, should I go to literacy, or go to math, or whatnot? Is that right?

Chris Engledowl: It was Math-specific from the beginning, so we were asking them, if you look at how much PL that is math-specific that you engaged in, how much total time did you spend on that?

Matt Minnick: I guess what I’m trying to ask is, do we know if those teachers only had five or less specific hours of total professional learning?

Zandra de Araujo: I would suspect that they had greater than that.

Matt Minnick: Okay, okay.

Chris Engledowl: Yeah, we only asked them to count up how much it was that was math-specific only.

Zandra de Araujo: And there was a conversation, like, a lot of teachers would say things like, we get a lot of access to literacy-based professional learning. I don’t think science came up, or social studies, or civics necessarily, and I don’t know what they would say in those areas, but, my guess is that they are getting PL on those district-wide days and things, it’s just not tending to be focused on mathematics, and the districts are largely choosing or suggesting PL for the teachers, and it’s largely not math-specific PL often.

Matt Minnick: Appreciate it. And it’s great to see this, like, kind of qualitative data, because, from our conversation last hour, when talking about the acceleration in math, anecdotally, that is exactly what I heard from about eight or 10 of the different participants, which was when I’m getting professional learning opportunities, it’s very often geared towards literacy, and that’s great for helping my kids learn how to read, but those strategies are just not the same thing as trying to accelerate my students in math. And I don’t know how to do it. And so that, anecdotally, was what I was hearing, and it’s interesting to see this data kind of really play out the same thing.

Zandra de Araujo: Yeah, and I would say that, like, it’s challenging, right, because it’s a problem of scale, because you want to support teachers who are coming in lateral entry and all kinds of different ways to the profession.

There’s been some nice studies out of Math Education that, and it was in initial teacher prep, so it’s a little different, but I think the findings apply, where, the University of Delaware has some really nice math methods courses that are on specific topics, so say, like, fractions or something like that. And so they dig really deeply, maybe over a semester or multiple semesters, into fractions. And then they followed the teachers into the classroom and saw if they could apply that same kind of depth to other content areas that they didn’t get that depth of instruction in.

And, like, I’m summarizing very broadly, but, like, by and large, that did not transfer to other subject areas. So if I teach you very deeply about fractions, and then I’m like, great, now you’re good, because you learned how to learn deeply and teach deeply, and now you can do it in geometry. There doesn’t seem to be evidence that suggests that that is the case, that a lot of it is specific to content, which makes it even more, like, critical that we’re not getting a lot of math-specific PL, and it’s not specific to the things that they’re actually teaching, because, that is one way to improve instruction, is really, deep, job-embedded, content-specific Math PL.

Matt Minnick: Okay, that’s, yeah, that’s helpful context as well, and, it is challenging, you know, you said it’s it’s tricky, like, no one that I spoke with felt great about it, but at the same time, they’re like, but we have to be able to get their reading levels up too, and that’s so important, you know, so, it did seem like a truly vexing, problem for them.

Zandra de Araujo: Yeah, and I think that’s where coaches, I mean, I get it, like budgets are not going to allow, if you need, like, investments in areas, and you’re between a literacy coach and a math coach, you know, it makes sense to go to a literacy coach, because exactly for the problems you’re saying. But also, like, if you have instructional leaders, or as Chris was alluding to, like, different ways to elevate teachers into leadership positions to support their colleagues, and use that PLC time that they often have in some kind of different ways.

Maybe that’s a promising opportunity to kind of build in some PL more purposefully without having to hire a totally, additional staff or faculty member into the equation, which I know is cost prohibitive, and also hard to do in every building in a district, you know.

Chris Engledowl: Yeah, and I think it’s important also, like, we’re not saying do math instead of literacy, we’re saying we need to do both, and they need to have the same kind of access and quality that exists. You know, we talked to districts that had good examples of these things. So, you know, it’s not that it can’t be done, it’s just that sometimes district structures make it more complicated to do it.

Being inventive with those is a place to start that doesn’t cost very much money to try to, at least test it out and see how it could work. I think the biggest point is just this access and quality.

Zandra de Araujo: Yeah. Good questions, I appreciate you asking.

Any other questions. You can place them in the chat, or ask me to unmute you, and I can do so. Along those lines, too, I’ll just share a resource that we released at the Center recently. We’ve been trying to imagine, are there some offerings that we can provide that maybe aren’t as extensive as professional learning, or as deep in terms of educative properties?

But what can we do to support teachers that are asking for more specific supports?

And so we’ve been doing, what we’ve termed instructional nudges as a part of an NSF grant, that I led for five years, and we’re trying to give something, because people are hungry for resources that might support them, so maybe this is, like, one such way to do it. And so the ones we put in the chat are specific to understanding math and language and having instructional conversations, and they’re supposed to be low-lift kind of things that instructional leaders can support, but I think we have to reimagine how we’re thinking about professional learning. We don’t have substitutes to cover days, have costs to send teachers to NCTM conferences every year, like we used to.

You know, so, like, getting creative and learning from other districts and what people are doing that might be something that you can apply in your own district is probably a good approach. And also, advocating for more funding for professional learning and coaches and things, as well as maybe beneficial.

All right, seeing no additional questions, we’re going to bring this webinar to a close. Thanks again to Dr. Sutcliffe and Dr. Engledowl for their extensive great work on this. If you have any questions, you have the link to the full reports, which we’ll probably answer them, but if not, you are more than welcome to email us as well, and if you want to stay on for a minute, you can do that as well. This will be posted, as I said, and you’ll receive an email with this recorded webinar and link to the website, so thank you so much!