Melissa D. Boston

In this research report, we consider how to empower K-8 teachers as mathematics instructional leaders to initiate and sustain improvements within their schools, as a practical and sustainable model of enacting change in mathematics education more broadly by developing leadership from within. We share the theoretical framework and findings from a 5-year National Science Foundation project. We utilized a longitudinal mixed methods approach, collecting data on teachers’ knowledge, instructional practices, leadership practices, and self-perception of growth throughout the project, triangulated with focus group data from teachers’ school administrators and project leaders and logs of leadership activities. Findings indicate positive changes in teachers’ knowledge and practices and in their role as instructional leaders in their schools, districts, and the mathematics education community. We conclude by sharing factors that appeared to support teachers’ growth as instructional leaders and implications for practice and research.

In this article we detail a research study using the Instructional Quality Assessment (IQA) Rubrics (Boston, 2012) as the frame for a professional development with mathematics teachers in grades 3-8. We wanted to create a professional development around a tool that was typically used in research as a way to observe teachers, as a tool to use with teachers on their reflection of instruction. In this study we share both the researchers’ and teachers’ perspectives of affordances and constraints of the professional development and observational rubrics.

In this article, we describe the development of a survey intended to assess teachers’ perceptions on teaching mathematics to African American students. Research on productive and unproductive mindsets that affect teachers’ ways of being in the classroom guided the design of the survey. We share results from three-survey administrations with two cohorts of teachers participating in a professional learning initiative designed to address historic and systemic inequities in the experiences and opportunities of African American students in mathematics classrooms, schools, and society more broadly. We discuss how the survey results can inform professional learning opportunities for mathematics teachers.

We present a framework for considering principals’ knowledge and actions to support high-quality instruction in a specific content area (mathematics). Using design research, we engaged principals in professional development and assessed principals’ ability to identify aspects of high-quality mathematical tasks and instruction through pre–post task sort analyses and classroom video analyses. Significant differences occurred in principals’ identification of high-quality mathematics tasks and instruction, students’ thinking, and teachers’ actions. Subsequent data identified changes in principals’ feedback to mathematics teachers; however, this change was not sustained in following years. We hypothesize necessary conditions for supporting principals as instructional leaders in specific content areas.

Direct assessments of instructional practice (e.g., classroom observations) are necessary to identify and eliminate opportunity gaps in students’ learning of mathematics. This study examined 114 middle school mathematics classrooms in four instructionally focused urban districts. Results from the Instructional Quality Assessment identified high percentages of lessons featuring cognitively challenging tasks, but declines in cognitive challenge during implementation and discussions. Overall instructional quality exceeded results from studies with nationally representative samples and paralleled results of studies of instructionally focused urban middle schools. Significant differences existed between districts, favoring the district with veteran teachers, long-term use of Standards-based curricula, and professional development initiatives.