In this conceptual article, we argue for the need to examine power relations in continuous improvement (CI) in education. Specifically, we contend that examining power in CI requires an examination of practices that constitute the work of CI. Drawing on practice theory, we conceptualize practice and power and use these constructs to examine a CI…

Years of failed attempts to engage my mathematics teacher students in exploration and co-creation led me to radically change my teaching approach. Inspired by literature that uses the jazz improv metaphor for teaching, I derived three tenets based on principles from jazz improv. First, I would bring no more than a single problem-solving task to…

There are many choices for learning mathematics for engineering students with courses available in face-to-face, blended and fully online modalities. Students are demanding more flexibility in their programs, however the temptation to misuse this flexibility to avoid mathematical studies until it is too late can be an unfortunate side effect. A…

This article explores the implementation of Olga Torres's Rights of the Learner (Torres's RotL) framework in a 100-level undergraduate mathematics course, particularly focusing on assessment practices. Torres's RotL framework offers a means to center students' voices, mathematical thinking, and humanity in the classroom. The article delves into…

State education agencies are sitting on rich repositories of quantitative and qualitative assessment data. This document is designed to provide a conceptual framework and implementation guidance that can help agency leadership leverage and interrogate student performance data in systematic ways for reporting, outreach, and planning purposes. The…

In 2013, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), working collaboratively with state education agencies, released a set of criteria for states to use to evaluate and procure high-quality assessments. The mathematics section of the document included five content-specific criteria to evaluate alignment of assessments to college- and…

Studies have shown that both the departmentalized and self-contained models of instruction can help students achieve strong mathematics scores on standardized tests, and school administrators must consider their teachers and students when deciding on an instructional model. However, little research has considered the effect of the instructional…

An elementary mathematics teacher once argued that she and her students held four Rights of the Learner in the classroom: (1) the right to be confused; (2) the right to claim a mistake; (3) the right to speak, listen and be heard; and (4) the right to write, do, and represent only what makes sense. Written as an emerging framework to promote…

In this paper I explore the question of what counts as successful implementation of a mathematics professional development (PD) project at scale. Two kinds of upscale are presented and differentiated from one another: upscale of settings and upscale of values, and the link between this differentiation and how success may be defined is discussed.…

With the proliferation of video-based professional development (PD) courses for mathematics teachers, understanding the role of the facilitators of these courses has become an emerging field of theoretical and empirical study. The purpose of this article is to address some of the challenges and opportunities that facilitation of discussions…

Two broad categories of instructional practices, (a) explicitly attending to concepts and (b) fostering students' opportunities to struggle, have been consistently linked to improving students' mathematical learning and achievement. In this article, we describe an effort to build these practices into a framework that is useful for a diverse set of…

Individualization of instruction in a regular classroom is difficult. The paper explores the possibilities of using a mobile touch device and a web tool for time individualization in mathematics instruction. The paper compares the pros and cons of using an electronic and a regular (printed) test to determine students' needs. The results show that…

This paper reflects on UK mathematics education following the poor performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) metric, which compares reading, science, and mathematics across 27 countries. We compared a range of features within secondary school mathematics in the UK with the countries outperforming the UK. We note…

In Peru, national assessments repeatedly rank Indigenous mathematics students as the lowest performing across the entirety of Latin America and South America. Whereas lack of financial resources often predicts low measures, the history of educational practice teaches us that students' poverty need not predict their educational outcomes -- creative…

In recent decades, technology has influenced various aspects of assessment in mathematics education: (1) supporting the assessment of higher-order thinking skills in mathematics, (2) representing authentic problems from the world around us to use and apply mathematical knowledge and skills, and (3) making the delivery of tests and the analysis of…