Supporting Mathematics Teachers’ Development of Ambitious Classroom Practices: The Contributions of Improvement Research

Our purpose in this paper is to clarify and illustrate key characteristics of improvement research that focuses on supports for teachers to improve the quality of their classroom practice. The key criteria for investigations to be viewed as instances of improvement research include that they involve cycles of disciplined inquiry in which conjectured solutions to pragmatically significantly problems are systematically tested and, as necessary, revised, elaborated, or abandoned. Furthermore, in investigations of this type, researchers often collaborate directly with practitioners and negotiate common problems of practice with them. Thus, in improvement research, the process of making improvements in the quality of students’ education is an ongoing, incremental, data-driven enterprise in which researchers conduct studies in collaboration with rather than on practitioners. We ground our discussion by focusing on four exemplary lines of investigation that aimed to support teachers’ efforts to improve their classroom practice. Taken together, these studies indicate the importance of establishing coherent teacher learning systems that coordinate different types of support for teachers’ learning. We conclude by considering the implications of our discussion for future investigations including the need for improvement research to focus more explicitly on issues of equity.