More than 60% of the nation's 14 million community college students are required to complete at least one developmental mathematics class before enrolling in college-credit courses; however, 80% of them do not successfully complete any collegelevel mathematics course within 3 years. To address this problem, the Community College Pathways initiative was launched in 2009. A core element is the Pathways Faculty Support Program, professional development aimed at supporting faculty to develop knowledge, beliefs, skills, and practices for teaching Pathways courses. In fall 2014, a redesign of the program used improvement science methods to design an infrastructure for responsive, flexible professional development that is sensitive to varying and changing conditions, with mechanisms for identifying, designing, and testing ideas for improvement. Specifically, our team employed a user-centered design process that foregrounds the needs and work processes of Pathways faculty and a measurement system that drives the continuous improvement of the program.

Teachers’ noticing of classroom activity shapes who is invited to participate, who is valued, and whose forms of knowing are included in mathematics classrooms. We introduce a framework for multidimensional noticing for equity that captures the stretch and expanse of teachers’ attention and sense making of the local, sociocultural, and historical aspects of mathematics classrooms. We use data from two teachers’ classrooms to illuminate how their noticing of students’ sociocultural selves, of the history of mathematics and schooling, and of students’ potential futures informs enactment of culturally sustaining instructional practice. We discuss this framework in relation to calls in mathematics education to create more equitable and affirming classroom spaces for youth.

Background and Context Continuous improvement and networked improvement science have emerged as prominent approaches to improving schools. Although continuous improvement approaches have generated promising results in education, how these efforts come to be enacted remains a crucial question that can generate insight into how these approaches can be improved. Purpose and Objective Our study is focused on understanding how improvement is performed by focusing on the process of generating a shared aim statement in a teacher-preparation improvement network. We seek to understand how practitioners within a network a) engage a central tension (between language acquisition and multilingualism), b) negotiate this tension, and c) reach a settlement that results in a shared aim. Setting This study takes place in a teacher-preparation improvement network as part of the California Teacher Education Research and Improvement Network (CTERIN). The focus of the network centered on improving the preparation of candidates to build on multilingual students’ strengths. Participants The improvement network that is the focus of our research consists of 49 teacher educators across eight teacher preparation programs as well as three facilitators who were part of CTERIN, including the two authors of this study. Research Design Our analysis examines the interactions among teacher educators and improvement facilitators to unveil the practices that they engaged in to produce a shared aim. Data for this study include audio and video recordings of three 90-minute videoconference meetings, audio–video of a two-day in-person convening, and improvement artifacts such as fishbone and driver diagrams. Findings Our study highlights the range of practices that practitioners engaged in and how those evolved as they negotiated and settled a tension between language acquisition and multilingualism. As the process of generating an aim unfolded, teacher educators engaged in the practices of aspirationalizing, dualizing, recentering, rerouting, clarifying, tuning, and converting. Conclusions and Recommendations We argue that these practices make visible that the process of generating an aim statement is a complex and complicated process that requires negotiation and a recognition that some perspectives are foregrounded and others are backgrounded. Understanding this process has implications for how improvement facilitators engage practitioners in the process of doing improvement and generates theory of improvement implementation by highlighting how disparate teams, individuals, and organizations reaching sharedness requires negotiating, foregrounding, and backgrounding.

Color-based segmentation vs. stereology: a simple comparison between two semiautomated methods of image analysis for the quantification of collagen.

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