Content area
Abstract
This three-article dissertation addresses persistent challenges in the field of teacher professional development and learning. To advance theoretical precision, it proposes adaptive expertise as a conceptual framework for understanding how professional learning fosters meaningful and sustained instructional improvement. The dissertation builds an integrated theory of instructional practice improvement and presents two empirical examples of strategies for enacting and studying that improvement.
Paper 1 develops a conceptual mechanism of adaptive expertise through qualitative, constructivist theory building and thematic analysis of professional development programs. This study identifies how specific design features and learning activities engage teachers’ content knowledge and domain skills, innovation skills, and metacognitive skills to support instructional change. Paper 2 empirically tests this mechanism in a quasi-experimental study of the Tennessee Mathematics Coaching Model with a prospectively matched sample of 250 teachers, using multiple imputations and mixed-effects modeling to examine how socially mediated coaching practices, particularly dialogic conversations, enhance teachers’ adoption of ambitious, conceptually focused mathematics instruction. Paper 3 extends the framework to the organizational level through analysis of survey data from 34 networked improvement communities. The paper explores educators’ perceived benefits and intrinsic motivations for participation as potential prerequisites for and proximal outcomes of sustained engagement in professional learning and positions continuous improvement methodologies as an approach of professional learning and instructional improvement.
Together, the studies demonstrate that adaptive expertise development provides a robust conceptual mechanism for explaining how professional development and learning opportunities can produce meaningful improvements in teaching. The dissertation advances theory, methodology, and practice by operationalizing adaptive expertise to inform the design, measurement, and scaling of high-quality professional learning that supports continuous teaching growth and enduring instructional improvement.