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District leaders often feel that working with researchers is not mutually beneficial. Researchers don’t provide enough practical guidance, and they’re often unable to present their findings in time to inform district decision making. Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are a potential new strategy for addressing these challenges. RPPs are long-term, mutual collaborations between practitioners and researchers that are organized to investigate problems of practice and solutions for improving district outcomes. By focusing on real-time district challenges, RPPs can lead to research that is informative, timely, and relevant to district stakeholders.

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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.

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