Designing Educational Infrastructures for Improvement: Instructional Coaching and Professional Learning Communities

This chapter examines one school district’s intentional efforts to design an educational infrastructure that fostered collaboration among teachers in its lowest-performing elementary schools at a time of mathematics instructional reform. Specifically, we describe how the integration of instructional coaches and the redesign of professional learning communities worked in tandem to support the quantity and quality of teachers’ interactions around the implementation of an inquiry-oriented mathematics curriculum and to facilitate changes in their reported classroom practices.