This paper explores an intervention for curriculum-based professional learning (CBPL) aiming to provide teachers with opportunities to reflect on their own mindsets around new curriculum. While we do not find significant effects of the intervention on most measured outcomes, we find a marginally significant and moderate-sized treatment effect on teacher self-reports of using district-adopted curriculum materials.
As districts have taken on large-scale curriculum shifts in recent years – spurred on in part by state legislation – district leaders have increasingly focused on providing professional learning (PL) opportunities aimed at helping teachers engage with and make sense of new instructional materials. These types of curriculum-based professional learning (CBPL) reflect a well-developed consensus from curriculum research that adoption of new materials does not necessarily translate into use – and growing evidence that recent teacher uptake of new materials has been slow.
This research report describes a test of an intervention, conducted as part of an existing research sequence on CBPL by RPPL research-practice partnerships, that aimed to provide teachers with opportunities to reflect on their own mindsets around the new curriculum. The intervention, which uses a series of written prompts across a defined time period, draws on principles from social psychology, asking teachers to explicitly connect their values and beliefs with the potential promise of high-quality curriculum.
This study was conducted by RPPL researchers at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University and Harvard University and implemented with RPPL member organizations delivering PL in schools.
This study represented an early attempt with the RPPL network to build randomized interventions that respond to hypotheses co-developed across PL organizations and PL researchers. While it was disappointing not to see bigger effects from the intervention, we see this study as an important step toward more frequent, quick turnaround PL interventions that allow the network to learn together about what it will take to improve PL at scale.”
