Teacher expertise for fostering at-risk students’ understanding of basic concepts: conceptual model and evidence for growth

Various intervention programs for fostering at-risk students’ understanding of basic concepts (such as place value understanding or meanings of multiplication and division) have been developed and evaluated. However, little is known about the teacher expertise required to enact these intervention programs, and how this teacher expertise can be promoted. The article suggests a conceptual model for teacher expertise for fostering at-risk students’ understanding based on three recurrent jobs: (a) specify learning content (in basic concepts), (b) monitor students’ learning progress (in basic concepts) and (3) enhance students’ understanding (of basic concepts). Mastering these jobs with productive teaching practices involves four orientations in particular (conceptual rather than procedural orientation, diagnostic rather than syllabus-led orientation, communicative rather than individualistic orientation, and long-term rather than short-term orientation) as well as detailed pedagogical content categories for unpacking relevant knowledge elements. The paper reports on the professional development program Mastering Math which aims at promoting this expertise and its evaluation using a pre–post-design. For 95 participating teachers, the practices for specifying goals and monitoring and enhancing at-risk students’ understanding were captured in self-reports and situated in vignette-based activities for eliciting diagnostic judgments. Teachers’ development across different aspects of their expertise from the beginning and the end of the 1-year PD reveals the first quantitative evidence that the PD was effective in promoting growth of expertise. Whereas specifying and monitoring practices had substantially developed, the enhancement practices were hindered by a persistent short-term orientation.