Where to go with teachers once they’ve drank the Kool-Aid??

So for the past 6 years, my main job has been to teach a 3-credit PD course for in-service teachers.  The course is based off Cognitively Guided Instruction, Jerome Bruner, Cathy Fosnot’s work, Realistic Math Education, John Van de Walle’s work, and many others depending upon the grade band of the course.  In the PD course, our goal is to help teachers see math through the lens of student thinking and how to teach conceptually on the way to understanding procedures.  We try to get teachers to consider a different way to teach math besides jumping straight to algorithms without understanding.  So really to me, that PD course has helped open teachers’ eyes to a way of teaching that most of them never experienced.  Every time I teach I hear multiple times comments like, “Why weren’t we taught math this way?”  The course gives them a glimpse of teaching math a different way, but often teachers think it is great, but not practical.  They have too much to teach to be able to teach it in the way we suggest, the parents won’t like it, and on and on.  There are lots of factors to consider when changing the way it has always been done, but many teachers do walk away from the course wanting to change.

The other part of my job is going into the schools in the 14 districts that I serve within my region of our state to help teachers implement the ideas from the course.  My job has no “normal” but often I work with individual teachers or a school staff on specific items that has been identified as an area of need by the teachers.  However, this year I have two different groups (one group has teachers from the same district and one group from multiple districts), both include teachers from Kindergarten up to 12th grade, and I’ve been asked to work with them yet without any direction.  The challenge comes from having such a large span of grade levels.  Most of them have “drank the Kool-aid,” they believe there is a better way to teach math and are ready for the next steps.  Many of them in the groups have worked with me in the past as we investigated the 5 Practices book and Accessible Mathematics.  Both of those books gave us a framework to talk about implementing ideas into their classrooms and allowed teachers of the various grade levels to see how the ideas would work with their students and their content.  Now I’m starting to run out of ideas and resources to use with these groups.  I’ve spent this time while teachers were not in school reading through books in hopes of finding something that would help me with these diverse groups of teachers.  I found stuff here and there, but not one resource that I could use as a theme of our work.  Do any of you out there have some suggestions of resources to help with implementation once you understand the theory???