AUTHORS

Tim Boerst

Tim Boerst is a Professor of Clinical Practice at the University of Michigan (U-M) School of Education. His work supports the development and assessment of beginning teachers who are pedagogically skilled, subject-matter serious, and professionally committed to the learning of every student. Over 15 years of elementary school teaching, Boerst earned and renewed National Board Certification as a Middle Childhood Generalist, held multiple leadership positions in the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and developed scholarship focused on mathematics teaching practice through the Center for Proficiency in Teaching Mathematics at U-M and the Carnegie Foundation. He studies teacher preparation and professional development, working in program and course design, teaching mathematics methods courses, and leading projects funded by NSF and IES focused on creating professional development materials and assessments of teaching practice. Boerst has played a key role in the redesign of U-M’s elementary teacher education programs: first as coordinator of Settings for Teaching and Learning, then as assessment coordinator, and as chair of the Elementary Teacher Education Program. Boerst earned a PhD in teacher education and an MA in mathematics education from the University of Michigan. In 2012, he received the Early Career Award for Distinguished Contributions to Teaching, Service, and Scholarship from the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators.

Kara Suzuka

Kara Suzuka is an assistant specialist with the Curriculum Research & Development Group at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her research centers on the development of resources for the study and improvement of teaching and teacher education, including the ways in which records of practice and technology can be used as tools for systematic inquiry and professional learning. She has been a co-principal investigator on several NSF grants, including the mod4 materials development project, the Design of Research-in-Instruction Laboratories (RI-Labs) project, and the DTE project. These projects share a focus on creating educational materials and experiences for teachers that are designed to help them further develop their mathematical knowledge and skills for teaching. Suzuka has also been the co-principal investigator for the Qualitative Data Reuse project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to study the development and re-use of classroom records of practice – particularly classroom videos – in the field of education. Her Ph.D. in curriculum, teaching, and educational policy is from Michigan State University.

Deborah Ball

Deborah Ball is William H. Payne Collegiate Professor, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, and the founding director of TeachingWorks at the University of Michigan School of Education. Ball has served on the National Science Board and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Board of Trustees. She has also served as the president of the American Educational Research Association and dean of the University of Michigan School of Education from 2005 to 2016. Ball’s work draws on her many years of experience as an elementary classroom teacher and teacher educator. Her research focuses on mathematics instruction and on interventions designed to improve its quality and effectiveness. Her research groups study the nature of the mathematical knowledge needed for teaching and develop survey measures that have made possible analyses of the relations among teachers’ mathematical knowledge; the quality of their teaching; and their students’ performance. Of particular interest in this research is instructional practice that can intervene on significant patterns of educational inequality in mathematics education. In addition, she and her group develop and study opportunities for teachers’ learning.

Hyman Bass

Hyman Bass is the Samuel Eilenberg Distinguished University Professor of Mathematics and Mathematics Education at the University of Michigan. His mathematical research publications cover broad areas of algebra, with connections to geometry, topology, and number theory. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Bass was president of the American Mathematical Society and of the International Commission on Mathematics Instruction. He has been collaborating with Deborah Ball and her research group at the University of Michigan, since 1997 on the mathematical knowledge and resources entailed in the teaching of mathematics at the elementary level. He is particularly interested in the teaching and learning of mathematical proof and proving in the early grades.

Aileen Kennison

Aileen Kennison has served as the DTE project manager. She joined the project in 2012, specializing in the data collection logistics. Kennison has also established and overseen contracts, managed vendor relationships, and acted as a liaison between project leads and professional development facilitators. Prior to joining the University of Michigan, she worked as a school administrator and a teacher at Bellflower Middle/High School in Bellflower, California. Kennison taught history and served as a mentor teacher to new teachers as well as a master teacher and supervisor of students completing their student teaching at California State University, Long Beach. She has a master’s degree in educational administration and a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Susanna Farmer

At the time of the project, Susanna Farmer was a doctoral candidate in the School of Education at the University of Michigan. She studied the role that shared instructional resources (e.g., lesson plans, student materials) play in creating opportunities for collective work on teaching and how curriculum materials can be designed to be usable and useful to teachers as they interact with students. Her dissertation investigates how six second-grade teachers work with curriculum materials to teach project-based social studies and literacy. She has also been a member of the elementary mathematics methods planning group at the University of Michigan and has taught the “Children as Sense-Makers” course in the elementary teacher education program. Prior to graduate school, Farmer taught first and third grade in Nashville, TN. She has a bachelor’s degree in elementary education from Vanderbilt University and a master’s degree in early and middle childhood education from Ohio State.

Yaa Cole

At the time of the project, Yaa Cole was a graduate student at the University of Michigan. She earned her PhD in mathematics education and began teaching in the Department for Teacher Education at University of Ghana. Her current research interests include the study of mathematical knowledge and skills needed for teaching at the elementary level, the preparation of pre-service mathematics teachers, teacher knowledge, and the professional development of elementary mathematics teachers. Cole received her bachelor’s degree in mathematics education at the University of Cape-Coast in Ghana and her master’s degree at the University of Vermont. She also worked as the Program Manager and Field Mentor for the Vermont Mathematics Initiative at the University of Vermont, providing guidance to elementary teachers enrolled in the program as they translated their new mathematics learning into good teaching practices.

Douglas H. Clements

Douglas H. Clements is the Kennedy Endowed Chair in Early Childhood Learning and a professor at the University of Denver, Colorado. Clements has published over 125 refereed research studies, 18 books, 80 chapters, and 300 additional publications on the learning and teaching of early mathematics; computer applications; creating, using, and evaluating research-based curricula; and taking interventions to scale, mostly with colleague and wife Julie Sarama. He served on the U.S. President’s National Mathematics Advisory Panel, the Common Core State Standards committee, and the National Research Council’s Committee on early mathematics and is a co-author for each of their reports. Additional information can be found at
http://du.academia.edu/DouglasClements,
http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Douglas_Clements/, and
http://portfolio.du.edu/dclemen9.

Julie Sarama

Julie Sarama is the Kennedy Endowed Chair in Innovative Learning Technologies and a professor at the University of Denver, Colorado. She has taught high school mathematics and computer science and gifted and early mathematics. She has directed multiple projects funded by the National Science Foundation and the Institute of Education Sciences and has authored over 50 refereed articles, 4 books, 30 chapters, and 20 computer programs, many with colleague Doug Clements. Her research interests include children’s development of mathematical concepts and competencies, implementation and scale-up of educational interventions, professional development models’ influence on student learning, and implementation and effects of software environments. Additional information can be found at http://portfolio.du.edu/jsarama.

Douglas Van Dine

At the time of the project, Douglas Van Dine was the research project director for the James C. Kennedy Institute for Educational Success at the University of Denver, overseeing the work of two large NSF-funded projects.  He was also a PhD student at the University of Buffalo where he completed his dissertation on the development and evaluation of a learning trajectory for volume measurement in young children. After receiving his degree, he began teaching mathematics at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Van Dine worked for 18 years in public education, 15 as a middle and high school mathematics teacher and 3 as a building administrator. He also served three years as project director at the University at Buffalo, SUNY for an NSF-funded longitudinal study of learning trajectories for length, area, and volume measurement. He has presented at numerous national conferences on learning trajectories for geometric measurement and has provided professional development on mathematics learning trajectories to primary and elementary teachers and administrators across the country, including Portland (ME), Des Moines (IA), Diboll (TX), Denver (CO), Buffalo (NY) and New York (NY).