Systems Reform

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.

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:

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.

This mixed-method comparative study examined lesson study in Japan as the original model, and interpretation and adaption of lesson study as an emerging new model of teacher professional development in Florida, the United States. The study found that lesson study has been interpreted through the lens of organizational structures and routines of teacher professional development in Florida and the U.S. in general, and the model was adapted to fit into the existing organizational contexts.