Systems Reform

Leading for Justice, Leading for Learning: Conceptualizing Urban School Leadership for Antiracist Mathematics Teaching and Learning

Urban school leaders can support mathematics instruction that acknowledges and sustains students’ racialized and cultured ways of knowing and being. Yet, leadership for racial justice is often discussed separately from instructional improvement. In this conceptual inquiry, we investigate how leadership can integrate antiracist practices into teaching and learning.

Author/Presenter

Jessica G. Rigby

Stephanie Forman

Lead Organization(s)
Year
2023
Short Description

Urban school leaders can support mathematics instruction that acknowledges and sustains students’ racialized and cultured ways of knowing and being. Yet, leadership for racial justice is often discussed separately from instructional improvement. In this conceptual inquiry, we investigate how leadership can integrate antiracist practices into teaching and learning.

Making Sense of Sensemaking: Understanding How K–12 Teachers and Coaches React to Visual Analytics

With the spread of learning analytics (LA) dashboards in K-12 schools, educators are increasingly expected to make sense of data to inform instruction. However, numerous features of school settings, such as specialized vantage points of educators, may lead to different ways of looking at data. This observation motivates the need to carefully observe and account for the ways data sensemaking occurs, and how it may differ across K-12 professional roles.

Author/Presenter

Fabio C. Campos

June Ahn

Daniela K. DiGiacomo

Ha Nguyen

Maria Hays

Year
2021
Short Description

With the spread of learning analytics (LA) dashboards in K-12 schools, educators are increasingly expected to make sense of data to inform instruction. However, numerous features of school settings, such as specialized vantage points of educators, may lead to different ways of looking at data. This observation motivates the need to carefully observe and account for the ways data sensemaking occurs, and how it may differ across K-12 professional roles. Our mixed-methods study reports on interviews and think-aloud sessions with middle-school mathematics teachers and instructional coaches from four districts in the United States.

A Model for Developing Sustainable Math Instructional Leadership

The Responsive Math Teaching project has been developing and refining a model for the development of mathematics instructional leadership in a network of 13 urban under-resourced elementary schools. The project is a research-practice partnership with Learning Network 2 in the School District of Philadelphia, a city where more than 80% of students live below federal poverty levels in a state with some of the largest gaps in the country between wealthy and poor districts. The RMT project is built around five core components:

Author/Presenter

The Responsive Math Teaching Project Team

Lead Organization(s)
Year
2021
Short Description

The Responsive Math Teaching project has been developing and refining a model for the development of mathematics instructional leadership in a network of 13 urban under-resourced elementary schools. This report summarizes the core elements of this model for developing sustainable math instructional leadership for systemic change at the district level.

Improving the Implementation of Rigorous Instructional Materials in Middle-Grades Mathematics: Developing a System of Practical Measures and Routines (Collaborative Research: Ahn, Cobb, Jackson, and Smith)

Principal Investigator:

This project has developed practical measures, and associated routines and data representations, to support the implementation of instructional improvement strategies (e.g.,coaching) in middle-grades mathematics teaching. We will describe our classroom measures, which assess students' perspectives of key aspects of the classroom learning environment; the contributions they have made to our partner districts’ improvement efforts; and how we have attended to validity in the design and use of practical measures.

Target Audience:

Exploratory Evidence on the Factors that Relate to Elementary School Science Learning Gains Among English Language Learners

Principal Investigator:

This study provides evidence on the confluence of school, classroom, teacher, and student inputs that shape elementary school science learning for English learners. The study explores the relationship between (1) science inputs (time on science, content covered, availability of lab resources, teacher training in science instruction, etc.), and (2) EL-specific inputs (classroom language use, EL instructional models, teacher certification/training, availability of EL support staff, etc.) for a nationally representative set of kindergarten through fifth graders.

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Target Audience:

Aligning the Science Teacher Education Pathway: A Networked Improvement Community

Principal Investigator:

The A-STEP project fosters collaboration between university faculty and pathway partners to implement common set of tools (Next Gen ASET Toolkit) across a science teacher training and development pathway. Partnerships across steps function under shared goals and paradigm shifts for pedagogical reform along the teacher pathway. A-STEP promotes change across our Networked Improvement Community (NIC) and the local pathway partners working with each university, ultimately impacting the enactment of the NGSS in respective K-12 classrooms.

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Target Audience:

Building Networks and Enhancing Diversity in the K-12 STEM Teaching Workforce

Principal Investigator:

The goal of this planning grant, which is based on the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). is to explicitly focus on broadening participation in the K-12 STEM teaching workforce, with the theory of action that diversifying the K-12 STEM teaching workforce would in the long term help more students see STEM as accessible to them and then be more likely to choose a STEM degree or career. This grant is also funded by NSF INCLUDES.

Co-PI(s): Helen Bond and Marilyn M Irving, Howard University; Hyunju Lee and Amy L D'Amico, Smithsonian Institution

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Transforming Scientific Practices to Promote Students Interest and Motivation in the Life Sciences: A Teacher Leadership Development Intervention

Principal Investigator:

How Do Teacher Leaders Transform Scientific Practices to Promote Students Interest and Motivation in STEM? Formal and informal K-12+ educators learn to employ strategies of community mapping, curricular mapping and place-based, culturally sustaining pedagogy to write, teach, and evaluate NGSS lessons that engage underrepresented students in mathematics, life, earth, and physical sciences. Two case studies highlight how educators apply these strategies to intersect three domains: experiential/place-based learning, culturally sustaining learning, and disciplinary learning .

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Target Audience:

The Anthropology of Educational Policy: Ethnographic Inquiries into Policy as Sociocultural Practice





Author/Presenter

Angelina E. Castagno

Teresa McCarty

Lead Organization(s)
Year
2018
Short Description

This book provides a single "go to" source on the disciplinary history, theoretical framework, methodology, and empirical applications of the anthropology of education policy across a range of education topics, policy debates, and settings.

Measuring Science Instructional Practice: A Survey Tool for the Age of NGSS

Ambitious efforts are taking place to implement a new vision for science education in the United States, in both Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)-adopted states and those states creating their own, often related, standards. Inservice and pre-service teacher educators are involved in supporting teacher shifts in practice toward the new standards. With these efforts, it will be important to document shifts in science instruction toward the goals of NGSS and broader science education reform.

Author/Presenter

Kathryn N. Hayes

Christine S. Lee

Rachelle DiStefano

Dawn O’Connor

Jeffery C. Seitz

Year
2016
Short Description

This article describes the process of developing and validating a Science Instructional Practices survey instrument that is appropriate for NGSS and other related science standards.