From 2003-2017, many California County Offices of Education and over 541 school districts provided professional development to their mathematics and science teachers under federally funded California Mathematics and Science Partnership (CaMSP) Program grants. Through CaMSP, more than 10,000 California teachers committed to three-year professional development programs that focused on evidence-based science and mathematics teaching methods based on improved teacher content knowledge and understanding of new content standards, assessment tools and curriculum. Ultimately, the goal was to impact student academic achievement and engagement in the classroom.

Public Works served as the evaluation partner of the CaMSP initiative, which since 2014 included the individual evaluations and reporting requirements for 55 partnerships under grant Cohorts 10 through 13. One of our challenges was to connect the cohorts across the state of California and support implementation of the professional development and evaluation requirements in the different regions of the state. A strategy PW used to accomplish this connection was establishing quarterly/monthly newsletters informing the partnerships of upcoming state and local evaluation tasks and requirements. The evaluation team valued the work of the projects and understood the partners’ need to share and learn from each other. The newsletter format was used to highlight the best practices of partnerships related to professional learning, technology and curriculum development. PW also produced short project summaries for each local evaluation that a project director could use for stakeholders and others in local forums for communicating project accomplishments and understanding evaluation results.

In 2017, Public Works published a statewide evaluation report for the CaMSP program that identified that local partnerships with school districts and universities, coupled with high teacher engagement in evidence-based science and mathematics professional development as key to STEM learning and transition to new standards in California under NGSS and the Common Core in mathematics. A summary presentation from this report can be found here.

Public Works evaluation of CaMSP across the state also identified that STEM-focused professional development provided an important lens on the coming opportunities to support teachers, and, in turn, students to learn in new ways. During the 12-year evaluation partnership, Public Works created a database of partnership curriculum resources, professional development learning tools, and best practices. A summary presentation of these tools and resources can be found here.