During the past decade teacher professional development has emphasized models that are job-embedded, sustained over time and focused on the nature of classroom teaching. The effectiveness of one of these models -- instructional coaching -- is just beginning to be researched. The goal of the proposed conference is to bring together researchers, mathematics coaches and staff developers of coaches so they can inform each other about their work, develop new questions for research, acquire new coaching tools and strategies and build a professional network for communication and collegial inquiry to be sustained after the conference by electronic communication and file-sharing.
