The Project

5 years.  $50,000. 20 badges. Infinite possibilities.

The Milwaukee Mathematics Teacher Partnership is recruiting high school mathematics and science teachers with Masters degrees to participate in an innovative five-year professional development project.

Teachers will identify areas of interest to study related to content and teaching practice, work with experts to learn new classroom techniques, and apply these techniques in their classrooms and study the student outcomes.

Participating teachers will design and earn four microcredential “badges,” graduate credit, and a $10,000 per year stipend.


This professional development project is scheduled to launch in September 2016.  Participating teachers will need to commit to entire five-year project at the start.

Year 1 will focus on a common set of badges that will focus on learning to conduct action research, becoming a consumer of mathematics and science education research, and tenets of instructional leadership.  Following these common badge experiences, small groups of teachers will identify topics that they wish to study related to content and/or pedagogy.  For example, a group of mathematics teachers might want to study the high school probability standards with a focus on tests of association, or specific discourse moves to use in their classrooms to promote more mathematics discussion.  A group of science teachers might want to investigate current topics in environmental science, or specific ways to create and implement inquiry-focused laboratory experiences with their students.

For each badge, groups of teachers will be supported by the project team to read and experience the topic under study in collaboration with content-area experts at UWM.  They will then design a very small-scale action research project related to the topic to use in their own classroom, collect data about student learning, and report back about student and teacher learning related to the intervention.  That’s a Level 1 badge!  We expect each badge to take 10-15 hours of work on the part of teachers from start to finish.

You’ll be able to display your badges both physically and digitally. Over the course of the project, you’ll have the opportunity to design and explore Level 1 badge explorations on a variety of topics.  You’ll also be able to engage colleagues at your school and in the district in learning and professional development, earning Level 2 and Level 3 badges.

This project is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (awards 1540840 and 1557397) to the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.  The content on this site does not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.