Establishing a partnership among a state department of education, educators, school district leaders and researchers to enhance early childhood educators’ mathematics teaching

High-quality early educational experiences, particularly in mathematics, are crucial for students’ success in K-12 schooling. To create these foundational experiences for young children, early childhood educators need opportunities to enhance their mathematics teaching through job-embedded, sustained professional learning. This partnership development project establishes the Research Practice Partnership for Professional Learning in Early Mathematics (RPP-PLEM), a collaboration among early childhood mathematics educators, school and district leaders, the state department of education, and university faculty in Delaware. These partners aim to enhance children’s early mathematics learning by collaboratively designing support systems for strengthening their teachers’ professional learning. Partnership development activities include having the university researcher collaborate with early childhood mathematics educators and leaders to learn more about their professional learning needs and to collect local evidence that reflects the voices of those most impacted by this work. To establish the RPP-PLEM, the team will engage in development activities. These activities aim to build trust, conduct rigorous research, support partner organizations, produce knowledge for educational improvement, and build the capacity of researchers and practitioners to engage in partnership work. The project will collect evidence using a research-practice partnership framework and use related tools to assess the formation of the partnership and to guide its work. As an outcome of this work the partnership will be positioned to begin responding to their collaboratively developed set of research and policy questions. These questions will be related to providing early childhood educators with support that deepens their knowledge of and ability to engage young children in learning mathematics. Evaluation findings will guide improvements, aid other researchers in developing similar partnerships, and will mobilize knowledge related to understanding the lived experiences of early childhood educators in relation to their ongoing professional identities as teachers of mathematics. This project is supported by the Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) which seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.