Linking New Ideas to Practice
A critical ingredient for discipline-based education reform is the way in which school leaders conceive of the reforms and act to support them. Principals' responsibilities - managing schools, supervising teachers, setting district-level professional development policy, selecting curricula and assessment instruments, and so on - put them in positions where they can either help or hinder reform efforts by the way that they see and understand the practical issues before them, and by the practical and professional judgments they make.
Research on the implementation of the NCTM Standards and the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics suggests that their translation into practice requires teachers and administrators to change how they think about the nature of mathematics and mathematics instruction. While there is an emerging body of research on the ideas that administrators construct about the reforms, and education programs that provide support as they work to understand reform ideas, as yet little research has been done to explore the impact of new ideas about learning, teaching, and mathematics on administrative practice itself.
The research undertaken in this project examines how principals connect new ideas about mathematics , learning, and teaching with the decisions and actions that constitute administrative practice. The work is situated theoretically in the domain of practical judgment and examines how new ideas about mathematics, learning, and teaching affect administrators' exercise of practical judgment on a daily basis in their work.
The study focuses on five school principals who are in the process of reconsidering their ideas about mathematics, learning, and teaching in relation to their administrative work. For this study, each administrator has identified a clearly defined aspect of his or her practice (here called a "unit of practice") on which the research focuses. This is a qualitative study of the practical judgment that these administrators exercise in the course of doing the work delineated in the "unit of practice," with a particular focus on the nature of the ideas about mathematics, learning, and teaching that underlie that judgment.
Principal Investigators:
Barbara Scott Nelson and Annette Sassi
1999-2001
Supported by The Spencer Foundation