Pathways professional development training supports teachers and departments throughout the entire process from piloting materials to scaling the curriculum’s use to sustaining its success into the future. Initial two- or three-day professional development workshops at a site introduce new Pathways instructors to Pathways learning goals and model strategies for engaging students in constructing productive mathematical meanings.

Workshop leaders engage participants in discussing general and specific learning goals for Pathways precalculus students, including developing students’ confidence and competence in using their mathematical thinking to make sense of problems and ideas independently. Workshop leaders also discuss attributes of effective instructors, including providing conceptually focused explanations, posing questions to advance students’ thinking, and orchestrating learning experiences that support students in constructing strong meanings for the course’s ideas, especially conceptualizing and representing quantities in applied contexts and considering how quantities’ values are related and vary together.

Modeling how to use the materials productively in workshop settings is key to initiating instructors’ interactions with the curriculum and instructor resources in ways that support their continued learning as they begin to teach with the materials.

The development team maintains long-term connections with each site to help train new instructors, support professional learning communities, and modify curriculum materials to meet the site’s unique needs to maximize success.