Supporting Change Agent Leadership in a Networked Improvement Community: Lessons Learned from the Mathematics Teacher Education Partnership

We will share our research and practical experiences and lessons learned from the Mathematics Teacher Education Partnership (MTEP), which has operated as a Networked Improvement Community (NIC) since 2012. MTEP is focused on improving the quality and quantity of secondary mathematics teachers via research-practice partnerships among teacher preparation programs and PK-12 schools and districts. Since 2022, MTEP leaders have studied the leadership actions and NIC progress of 20 geographically dispersed NICs of various sizes from two to 20 institutions. We have created storylines for these 20 NICs, comprised of timelines and key activities over time. The storylines include: NIC as a community; change leader characteristics; role of equity; culture and institutional contexts; alignment of NIC work with MTEP goal of programs engaged in continuous improvement efforts toward AMTE standards; key challenges; and key tensions. Our data include documentation of NIC activities (membership, aims, change levers, driver diagrams), interviews with NIC members, MTEP change coach and change agent leadership activity logs, surveys of NIC progress, and documentation of MTEP efforts to support change agents. We will share MTEP lessons learned around these storyline categories and also how MTEP as an organization has supported and coached change agents as change leaders. We will also share resources from the MTEP website. Although our change efforts are focused on improving secondary mathematics teacher preparation, our findings related to change agent support, NICs, data collection, and storyline process are widely applicable to different types of change efforts. This poster is primarily aligned with the intention "highlight early and mature projects touching on outcomes, processes, and contexts of change". Some of our research with change agents will address considerations of power dynamics, particularly when there are historical power imbalances (such as when a lang-grand university brings on a historically Black college or university into a partnership).