Interactive, Individualized Professional Learning for Elementary School Teachers: Enhancing Content and Pedagogical Content Knowledge as a Basis for Improving Practice

Mathematics plays a critical role in students’ career choices as well as their success in STEM fields. Unfortunately, math performance often declines as students’ progress through the grade levels. The goal of this project is to enhance elementary school teachers’ capacity to improve students’ mathematics learning through a scaled professional development program that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create a personalized, active learning environment for teachers. The professional development program focuses on key elements of content-specific expertise needed for teaching, such as enhancing teachers’ understanding of the foundational ideas behind numbers and operations concepts that are developed across grade levels, as well as teachers’ understanding of how students learn these concepts and how various instructional tools and practices can improve students’ learning. By creating a professional development that is adaptive to the individualized needs of teachers and is accessible to teachers anywhere and at any time, this work has the potential to change student outcomes at scale.