Sustained professional development is critical to support mathematics teachers’ development of ambitious instructional practices. This study aimed to better understand the factors and conditions that impact mathematics teachers’ persistent participation in an optional, online professional development that includes a sequence of three workshops focused on doing mathematics and examining student mathematics work. We interviewed 37 mathematics teachers and explored their perceived utility of our online workshops for their instructional practice, perceived expectations for instruction in their local institutional context, and persistence in the online workshops.

We identified three types of alignment— alignment, misalignment, and emerging (mis)alignment— between participants’ perceived utility of the workshops and perceived expectations for instruction in their local institutional context, and these alignments were significantly related to their persistence in the workshops. Our findings suggest that teachers’ interest and persistence in optional, online professional development focused on ambitious instructional practices is an emergent phenomenon that depends, in part, upon the affordances and constraints for instruction in their local context. We argue that teachers’ experiences of alignment can differentially trigger and sustain situational interest, the recognition of relevance of ambitious instructional practices to day-to-day classroom work, and persistence in online professional development. We offer a set of online professional development design features to help teachers connect their learning with expectations for instruction in their local institutional context.

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