Systems Reform

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.

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.