By Alyson E. Lischka and Amy Bennett, MTEP 2.0 Research Hub members
As the Mathematics Teacher Education Partnership continues to grow, there are many stories to tell about the good work of MTEP teams toward program transformation. Some teams are finding success in building networks across institutions. Others are redesigning programs to meet new state requirements or attending to shifting state policies. Still others are joining together to support graduates as they transition into the teaching profession. Leaning into the knowledge that "all change is local," MTEP is seeks to learn how the network functions to support this growth for each local team, accounting for the diversity in contexts across the network.
Each year, MTEP teams provide a variety of data to track their team progress, including counts of program graduates, assessment of progress toward the Guiding Principles, evidence of teams’ networked improvement community processes such as driver diagrams and plan-do-study-act (PDSA) cycles, participation in MTEP events, and information about the work of team leaders and coaches. This year, the Research Hub is focused on generating a "storyline" for each team in the network that draws on all of the submitted data.
Each storyline will include a summary of findings from across the team data related to community, leadership, culture, institutional context, the role of equity, participation in MTEP events, and key challenges and tensions. This summary will be accompanied by a timeline (see Figure 1) that provides a depiction of team growth and accomplishments at a glance. The timeline will indicate when significant changes, progress, or obstacles occur, including changes to a team’s aims and NIC configuration and progress within a PDSA cycle (see the legend).
The completed storylines will provide the Research Hub with opportunities to draw comparisons across teams, learning about variations across contexts and effectiveness of MTEP supports. These storylines can also be used as the foundation for writing and will be available to teams as they work to share their efforts in manuscripts.
The January NIC-Cast will support teams to consider how they might use their storylines to write about their work. What stories do you have to share about the work of your team? How might you incorporate your team’s data-based storyline as you tell your story?