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Methodology
Design Research Component
Researchers will refine conjectures about school and district support structures by:
1) identifying additional support structures
2) specifying the conditions under which particular support structures are important
Hypothesis Testing Component
Researchers will analyze longitudinal data set to test theory-based hypotheses about the relationship between change in school and district support structures and improvement in mathematics teachers' instructional practices and student achievement
Conjectures About District and School Support Structures
There will be greater improvement in the quality of mathematics teaching and student learning when the following school and district support structures are established:
|
Primary Support Structure |
Facilitating Support Structure |
Hypothesized Consequence |
|---|---|---|
| Teacher Networks | Time for collaboration Access to expertise |
Social support for development of ambitious instructional practice |
| Shared instructional vision | Brokers negotiation of the meaning of key boundary objects | Coherent instructional improvement effort |
| Accountability Relations and Relations of Assistance between teachers, school leaders, and district leaders | Leadership content knowledge | Effective instructional leadership practices |
| De-tracked instructional program | Category system for classifying students | Equity in students' learning opportunities |
Long Term Goals for Study
We will develop an Institutional Improvement Framework for guiding, monitoring, and assessing school- and district-wide institutional improvement in mathematics
The framework will
• reflect a comprehensive view of the institutional setting of mathematics teaching and have a strong content focus
• bridge research in mathematics education and in policy and leadership
• support a new interventionist genre of research in which organizational design is at the service of large scale teacher development efforts in mathematics education
• enable teacher developers to document the institutional settings in which teachers are working, anticipate needed support structures, and plan strategically for the development of those structures as part of the improvement effort
