What Makes for Powerful Classrooms, and How Can We Support Teachers in Creating Them? A Story of Research and Practice, Productively Intertwined

This article, and my career as an educational researcher, are grounded in two fundamental assumptions: (1) that research and practice can and should live in productive synergy, with each enhancing the other; and (2) that research focused on teaching and learning in a particular discipline can, if carefully framed, yield insights that have implications across a broad spectrum of disciplines. This article begins by describing in brief two bodies of work that exemplify these two fundamental assumptions. I then elaborate on a third example, the development of a new set of tools for understanding and supporting powerful mathematics classroom instruction and by extension, powerful instruction across a wide range of disciplines.