Assistant Professor, McGill University
Kara Jackson is currently an assistant professor in mathematics education at McGill University. She earned her doctorate in education, culture, and society with an emphasis in mathematics education in 2007 from the University of Pennsylvania. From 2007 to 2010, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody School of Education in the Department of Teaching and Learning. While at Vanderbilt, she worked on the NSF-funded project, Designing Learning Organizations for Instructional Improvement in Mathematics. She is currently a co-principal investigator on an NSF-funded extension of this study. In 2010, she received a National Academy of Education/Spencer Post-Doctoral Fellowship to investigate how districts and schools (with diverse organizational constraints and resources) can configure aspects of institutional settings to support middle grades mathematics teachers’ development of ambitious and equitable instructional practices. She has taught mathematics to students in grades 2–12 and adults. Her research interests focus on specifying forms of practice that support all learners to participate in rigorous mathematics, particularly youth who are underserved in U.S. classrooms, and how to support teachers to develop such forms of practice.
Designing Learning Organizations for Instructional Improvement in Mathematics
The overall goal of this research project is to understand what it takes to support mathematics teachers in improving the quality of their mathematics instruction at the scale of large, urban US districts.The project has two major phases. Phase 1: 2007–2011 The first phase of the research project was conducted in collaboration with four large, urban districts that serve a total of 360,000 students. The districts were all implementing inquiry-oriented instructional improvement initiatives in middle-grades mathematics (e.g., three of the four districts adopted the Connected Mathematics Project 2. Read more
