Abstract
This article describes an analytic approach for situating teachers’ instructional practices within the institutional settings of the schools and school districts in which they work. The approach treats instructional leadership and teaching as distributed activities and involves first delineating the communities of practice within a school or district whose enterprises are concerned with teaching and learning and then analyzing three types of interconnections between them: boundary encounters, brokers, and boundary objects. We illustrate the analytic approach by focusing on one urban school district in which we have conducted an ongoing collaboration with a group of middle school teachers. In doing so, we clarify the critical role that school and district-level leaders can play in mediating state and federal high-stakes accountability policies. We conclude by discussing the implications of the analysis for the process of upscaling and the diffusion of instructional innovations.
Mind, Culture, and Activity, 13 (2006), 80–100.
Copyright © 2006, Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The authors made equal contributions to this article and are listed alphabetically.
- 2.
Although the term middle school is not entirely accurate in all three settings, we use it nonetheless in the remainder of the article to designate the three schools that housed Grades 6–8.
- 3.
We construe these means of support broadly so that they include the nature of classroom discourse and the classroom activity structure as well as instructional materials and associated tools.
- 4.
We are in fact investigating these conjectures by collaborating with groups of teachers in two contrasting urban districts. A description of the second district can be found in Cobb, McClain, Lamberg, and Dean (2003).
- 5.
The process of documenting the learning of a professional teaching community involved identifying the successive norms that became established for general participation, mathematical reasoning, pedagogical reasoning, and strategic norms (i.e., the ways of understanding the institutional setting for mathematics teaching that have become normative within the professional teaching community). A discussion of the criteria that need to be satisfied when identifying communal norms can be found in Cobb, Stephan, McClain, and Gravemeijer (2001).
- 6.
Reification as Wenger (1998) defined it should not be confused with Sfard’s use (1991, 1994) of this same term. For Sfard, reification is the process by which mathematical objects are constructed from operational mathematical processes. Wenger’s use of the term is less technical and refers to the process by which members of a community create objects that, for them, carry particular practice-based meanings. As he made clear, the process of reification complements participation in the sense that mutual engagement typically involves the use of artifacts that are the product of prior reifications.
References
Ball, D. (1996). Teacher learning and the mathematics reforms: What we think we know and what we need to learn. Phi Delta Kappan, 77(7), 500–508.
Brown, A. L. (1992). Design experiments: Theoretical and methodological challenges in creating complex interventions in classrooms. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2, 141–178.
Brown, C., Stein, M., & Forman, E. (1996). Assisting teachers and students to reform the mathematics classroom. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 31, 63–93.
Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (2000). The social life of information. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Cobb, P., Confrey, J., diSessa, A., Lehrer, R., & Schauble, L. (2003). Design experiments in educational research. Educational Researcher, 32(1), 9–13.
Cobb, P., & McClain, K. (2001). An approach for supporting teachers’ learning in social context. In F.-L. Lin & T. Cooney (Eds.), Making sense of mathematics teacher education (pp. 207–232). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic.
Cobb, P., McClain, K., Lamberg, T., & Dean, C. (2003). Situating teaching in the institutional setting of the school and school district. Educational Researcher, 32(6), 13–24.
Cobb, P., Stephan, M., McClain, K., & Gravemeijer, K. (2001). Participating in classroom mathematical practices. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 10, 113–164.
Confrey, J., Bell, K., & Carrejo, D. (2001, April). Systemic crossfire: What implementation research reveals about urban reform in mathematics. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Seattle, WA.
Engeström, Y. (1998). Reorganizing the motivational sphere of classroom culture: An activity theoretical analysis of planning in a teacher team. In F. Seeger, J. Voight, & U. Waschescio (Eds.), The culture of the mathematics classroom (pp. 76–103). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Feiman-Nemser, S., & Remillard, J. (1996). Perspectives on learning to teach. In F. Murray (Ed.), The teacher educator’s handbook (pp. 63–91). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Franke, M. L., Carpenter, T. P., Levi, L., & Fennema, E. (2001). Capturing teachers’ generative change: A follow-up study of teachers’ professional development in mathematics. American Educational Research Journal, 38, 653–689.
Gamoran, A., Anderson, C. W., Quiroz, P. A., Secada, W. G., Williams, T., & Ashman, S. (2003). Capacity for change: How districts and schools can support teaching for understanding in mathematics and science. New York: Teachers College Press.
McClain, K. (2003, April). Tools for supporting teacher change: A case from statistics. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association, Chicago.
McDermott, R. P. (1976). Kids make sense: An ethnographic account of the interactional management of success and failure in one first-grade classroom. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. (1991). Professional standards for teaching mathematics. Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Nelson, B. (1999). Building new knowledge by thinking: How administrators can learn what they need to know about mathematics education reform. Newton, MA: Educational Development Center.
Newman, F. M., & Associates, (1996). Authentic achievement: Restructuring schools for intellectual quality. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Rogers, E. M. (1995). Diffusion of innovations. New York: Free Press.
Senger, E. (1999). Reflective reform in mathematics: The recursive nature of teacher change. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 37, 199–221.
Sfard, A. (1991). On the dual nature of mathematical conceptions: Reflections on processes and objects as different sides of the same coin. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 22, 1–36.
Sfard, A. (1994). Reification as the birth of metaphor. For the Learning of Mathematics, 14(1), 44–55.
Simon, M., & Tzur, R. (1999). Explicating the teacher’s perspective from the researchers’ perspective: Generating accounts of mathematics teachers’ practice. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 30, 252–264.
Spillane, J. (2000). Cognition and policy implementation: District policy-makers and the reform of mathematics education. Cognition and Instruction, 18, 141–179.
Spillane, J. P., Halverson, R., & Diamond, J. B. (1999, April). Distributed leadership: Towards a theory of school leadership practice. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Spillane, J. P., Halverson, R., & Diamond, J. B. (2001). Towards a theory of leadership practice: Implications of a distributed perspective. Educational Researcher, 30(3), 23–30.
Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional ecology, “translations,” and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39. Social Studies of Science, 19, 387–420.
Stein, M. K., & Brown, C. A. (1997). Teacher learning in a social context: Integrating collaborative and institutional processes with the study of teacher change. In E. Fennema & B. Scott Nelson (Eds.), Mathematics teachers in transition (pp. 155–192). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Talbert, J. E., & McLaughlin, M. W. (1999). Assessing the school environment: Embedded contexts and bottom-up research strategies. In S. L. Friedman & T. D. Wachs (Eds.), Measuring environment across the life span (pp. 197–226). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Zaritsky, R., Kelly, A. E., Flowers, W., Rogers, E., & O’Neill, P. (2003). Clinical design sciences: A view from sister design efforts. Educational Researcher, 32(1), 32–34.
Acknowledgments
The analysis presented in this article was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants REC-0231037 and REC-0135062. The opinions expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect the position, policy, or endorsement of the foundation.
We are grateful to the teachers and administrators in the Washington Park district for opening their schools and classrooms so that they became sites for our learning. We are also grateful to the reviewer of the manuscript for the helpful comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cobb, P., McClain, K. (2010). The Collective Mediation of a High-Stakes Accountability Program: Communities and Networks of Practice. In: Sfard, A., Gravemeijer, K., Yackel, E. (eds) A Journey in Mathematics Education Research. Mathematics Education Library, vol 48. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9729-3_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9729-3_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-9728-6
Online ISBN: 978-90-481-9729-3
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawEducation (R0)