Negotiating Reform: Implementing Process Standards in Culturally Responsive Professional Development

The paper presents the guiding ideas behind our culturally responsive approach to teacher professional development and an overview of how those tenets inform, tacitly and directly, our efforts to realize the promise of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' five Process Standards. A review of the primary obstacles teachers face in implementing these standards in their own teaching and learning is followed by a description of the design elements in a university-based professional development program. Our goal is to provide an example of the foundations upon which an evolving approach to culturally responsive professional development planning has grown. We discuss research on what constitutes effective teacher professional development while noting the paucity of programs that embrace recognized needs. We do not give a prescription for effective teacher development. Instead, we speak as teacher-educators about the necessary philosophical and self-evaluative underpinnings to effective professional development and our approach to creating an environment where it is safe to leave the isolation of forced autonomy and it is valued to be reflective about community, mathematical activity, and intellectual engagement.