Designing infrastructures to support instruction remains a challenge in educational reform. This article reports on a study of one school system's efforts to redesign its infrastructure for mathematics instruction by promoting teacher leadership. Using social network and interview data from 12 elementary schools, we explore how the district's infrastructure redesign efforts were internally coherent with and built upon existing infrastructure components. We then explore relations between infrastructure and school practice as captured in the instructional advice-and information-seeking interactions among school staff, finding that teacher leaders emerged as central actors and brokers of advice and information about mathematics within and between schools. Further, changes in school advice and information networks were associated with shifts in teachers' beliefs about and practices in mathematics toward inquiry-oriented approaches consistent with district curriculum. We argue that the district's redesign efforts to support teacher leadership coupled district curriculum and school and classroom practice in mathematics. Disciplines Curriculum and Instruction | Science and Mathematics Education Comments View on the CPRE website.
The present study investigated the effects of Primarily Math, an inservice elementary mathematics specialist program. Primarily Math sought to augment the mathematical knowledge for teaching of kindergarten through third-grade teachers using a longitudinal multiple cohort design. Two sets of analyses were conducted. The first examined impact on teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching, attitudes toward learning mathematics, and beliefs about teaching and learning relative to a matched comparison group. Primarily Math teachers demonstrated greater knowledge for teaching Numbers and Operations and more positive attitudes toward learning mathematics, and more often endorsed student-centered beliefs about teaching and learning. The second set of analyses examined the extent to which students of three cohorts of Primarily Math teachers demonstrated more fall–spring growth in a measure of mathematics achievement relative to students of comparison-group teachers. There was a small but positive effect of participation in Primarily Math on student mathematics achievement.
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