Teacher Learning and Standards-Based Instruction

The topic of standards-based instruction is currently at the forefront of conversations about education at every level, including teacher education and professional development. The proliferation of state curriculum standards over the past decade and the recent development of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for English/Language Arts and Mathematics as well as the release of the second draft of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in January 2013 have fueled this conversation. Standards-based curriculum and assessment, and the accompanying accountability associated with their implementation, place considerable pressure on preservice and inservice teacher educators to enable teachers to effectively incorporate the standards into instruction. The more recent content standards emphasize student depth of knowledge, higher order thinking, and adaptive application that places great demands on the kind of teaching skills that few teachers currently possess (Lampert, this issue) and will require particular attention to the type of professional development needed for both preservice and inservice teachers (Moon, Michaels, & Reiser, 2012). In our Call for Manuscripts for this theme issue, we invited empirical or conceptual manuscripts addressing teacher professional development in the context of reforms such as CCSS. Our intent was to move the community forward in understanding and studying the nature and impact of professional development focused on recent standards-based curricular reforms. Three articles emerged which addressed the topic either directly through (a) design of professional development programs for CCSS (Marrongelle, this issue) or indirectly through (b) examination of the relationship between teacher education and the alignment of instruction with standards (Polikoff, this issue) and (c) examination of teacher education strategies to develop the kind of teaching practices associated with rigorous curricular reforms (Lampert, this issue). Overview of Features and Articles This issue is divided conceptually into three parts. The first part represents the theme of standards-based instruction discussed previously and features three articles. The first article, "Scaling up Professional Development in an Era of Common State Standards" by Karen Marrongelle, Paola Sztajn, and Margaret Smith, describes the process and outcomes of a project to generate design recommendations for professional development programs to support CCSS in mathematics (CCSSM). While the focus is mathematics, the authors argue that the process and many of the elements are applicable to other content areas. The project involved the collaboration of practitioners and researchers representing a mixture of expertise (math, math education, assessment, policy, equity, and systems-thinking) and resulted in a set of recommendations for large-scale, systems-level professional development aligned with CCSSM. The second article, "Teacher Education, Experience, and the Practice of Aligned Instruction" by Morgan Polikoff uses a large-scale survey approach to examine the relationship between teacher education and experiences and teacher reports of their content coverage in comparison with content analyses of state standards. The author found that more experienced teachers, beyond the 1st year and up to 11 years of experience, with more content area courses exhibited more aligned instruction. However, the effects were small and the author suggests that other factors such as work environment and student characteristics and consideration of more precise measures of teacher education may be needed. The findings indicate that more professional development support for standards implementation may be needed for preservice and 1st-year teachers as well as more experienced teachers. The last theme article, "Keeping It Complex: Using Rehearsals to Support Novice Teacher Learning of Ambitious Teaching" by Lampert, Franke, Kazemi, Ghousseini, Turrou, Beasly, Cunard, and Crowe, provides a very different approach to standards-based instruction. …