A Mathematics Teacher Leadership Center (Math TLC) is proposed by the University of Northern Colorado and its Core Partners, the University of Wyoming, Greeley School District #6 (CO), Morgan County School District (CO), Poudre County School District (CO), Laramie County School District 1 (WY), and Carbon County School District 1 (WY).

Math TLC is an integrated partnership to improve mathematics in middle, secondary and post secondary education in the north Rocky Mountains region. Key to this Teacher Institute project is working with teachers and districts to retain new and continuing teachers in the field and develop leadership capacity. The Partners will develop and implement a Master's degree in Secondary Mathematics, and a Teacher Leadership Program in mathematics for teachers, grades 4-12. Research is to be carried out on the impact of both these programs on student achievement.

The Master's program (32 credit hours) will support 4 cohorts of 15-18 teachers per year and the Teacher Leadership program (24 credit hours) will support 3 cohorts of 10-12 teachers per year, over the five year project. The courses will be a combination of face- to-face and on-line delivery. More than 95,000 students from grades 4 through 12 are potentially impacted over the life of the project: 23,700 directly by teacher enrolled in the master's program and 71, 000 students of teachers who will work with Teacher Leaders. An intensive recruitment program is planned to attract teachers from Native American school districts in Colorado (Southern Ute Indian Reservation and Ute Mountain Indian Reservation) and Wyoming (the Wind River Reservation).

The research program will study the impact of professional development (PD) on teachers' mathematical understanding, pedagogical content knowledge and cultural competencies for teaching diverse students in Colorado and Wyoming. The study will track teacher change and its effect on student achievement, grades 6-12, and will advance knowledge of teacher leadership development through a quantitative design experiment of the leadership model proposed by the project.

The transformative concept in Math TLC is the development of the online master's degree shared jointly by the Universities of Northern Colorado and Wyoming in combination with a leadership program. Success will require substantive institutional affiliation and will transform PD for isolated rural teachers by providing significant mathematics content integrated with culturally informed pedagogical methods, by creating master teachers and teacher-leaders that have the expertise to intellectually engage underserved groups.

The comprehensive dissemination plan includes a web portal for the online distribution of research and implementation outcomes, publications of findings in peer reviewed journals and presentations at regional and national meetings. The Partnership will actively work in the future to broaden the collaborative to include additional school and university partners.

The benefits to society are improved mathematics teaching and learning in socio-economically, culturally, and ethnically diverse classrooms.