by W. Gary Martin, MTEP 2.0 principal investigator
Each spring and summer for the past three years, the MTEP leadership has engaged in intensive strategic planning for the coming academic year. This year was no exception. (See the 2025-2026 Strategic Plan.) It may come as no surprise that our strategic planning is organized around our driver diagram, which provides a plan of action for MTEP, organized into four hubs addressing different primary and secondary drivers.
Much of the strategic planning may seem rather mundane, as it revisits ongoing project activities, establishing what we dub "baseline goals." It is, however, important to revisit whether our activities are still supporting our drivers, helping us to achieve our aim. Many of the baseline goals are in the category of "keep doing what we’re doing"—hold NIC-Casts and the MTEP Conference, ensure change coaches are effectively supporting the MTEP teams, continue to build our social media presence, publish the newsletter, hold outreach events to engage potential partners and better connect with the broader community engaged in mathematics teacher preparation, and, of course, collect and analyze data about our efforts and share what we are learning.
Other goals are a little more exciting—"stretch goals" that establish new areas that we want to explore. Some of those goals are already emerging:
- Hold a redesigned Fall 2025 Kick-off Meeting (which we did on Sept. 12)
- Announce a new mini-grant program to support improvement efforts
- Incorporate a pre-conference into our annual MTEP Conference, to be held in conjunction with ESTEEM to enhance attention to data science
- Launch a leadership academy to build a next generation of MTEP leaders
- Build our network expansion efforts where we connect with other organizations
- Develop new resources to support MTEP teams, including a database of PDSA cycles conducted by teams and partnership profiles compiled for each team, based on the data they have submitted
As we are entering the final year of our current four-year grant, we also spent quite a bit of time contemplating where we go from here. Some of that thinking is reflected in our new stretch goals. We invite you to share your thoughts with us about how we can maximize our efforts this year to build a platform for continued support of the improvement of secondary mathematics teacher preparation.