Chapter 2: Transforming Secondary Mathematics Teacher Preparation Programs¹

From its inception, the Mathematics Teacher Education Partnership (MTE-Partnership) has had as its goal of transforming secondary mathematics teacher preparation in alignment with the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010) and other rigorous standards. More recently, the goal has expanded to encompass the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators’ (2017) Standards for the Preparation of Teachers of Mathematics (AMTE Standards). As the MTE-Partnership adapted the Networked Improvement Community (NIC) design (Bryk, Gomez, Brunow, & LeMahieu, 2015), two aims were set: (a) increase the supply and (b) increase the quality of secondary mathematics candidates. The MTE-Partnership also identified a set of four primary drivers (see Chapter 1) and disaggregated its work into five Research Action Clusters (RACs) addressing various aspects of the primary drivers, thus allowing the MTE-Partnership to “accelerate learning” through the power of the network (Bryk et al., 2015, p. 141). This approach, however, results in a conundrum: Each partnership team, generally, is only involved in one (or perhaps two) of these RACs—meaning that they are addressing only some of the areas of critical need. To fully meet the aim of the MTE-Partnership, teams must shift toward more holistic program transformation and integrate the work of the MTE-Partnership across multiple RACs into their local improvement efforts. However, making such a shift will, in many cases, raise a number of significant challenges including capacity and human capital, issues with the will to improve mathematics teacher preparation across stakeholder groups, and issues with institutional resources and support structures.