Critical Success Factors Implementing Multimedia Case-based Teacher Professional Development

This document presents research findings concerning Critical Success Factors (CSF)—those few activity areas that deserve special attention to success—implementing multimedia case-based teacher professional development in school districts where this is an educational innovation. Our findings emerge from data collected during the first pilot implementation of the Seeing Math Telecommunications project. This is an initiative devoted to helping elementary and middle school teachers improve their teaching practices by means of reflecting on and discussing relevant teaching episodes, documented as multimedia information. Four U.S. school districts from different regions of the country and with very different characteristics participated in the experience. Each of them, committed to the idea of implementing video case-based teacher professional development, tried to explore it as an educational innovation. A local facilitator, designated by each school district, led the process of appropriating and customizing the idea, as well as of helping groups of teachers benefit from it. Different levels of success institutionalizing video case-based teacher professional development were obtained by participating school districts, as a result of multiple intervening variables. Its study was our research focus. Our research findings are subsets of these variables, those that may make a difference for the success or failure of an innovation at its different stages.