Improving Teacher Quality in Southern Illinois: Rural Access to Mathematics Professional Development (RAMPD).

This article describes how Southern Illinois University-Carbondale (SIUC) partnered with twelve rural schools with high percentages of students in poverty. SIUC provided faculty development activities featuring the adoption of Cognitively Guided Instruction, combined with activities to increase math content and to reduce math anxiety for groups of instructors lacking specific training in mathematics. The partnership is a positive example of a complex-brokered partnership, with instructional experts who were not members of the SIUC faculty. The success and sustainability of this partnership are analyzed to discover the factors that contributed to the durability of what may have been, in other circumstances, a fragile and weak partnership. During the past half century great promises have been made about the educational benefits of school-university partnerships. Translating these promises into solid achievements in local schools is not a simple linear process. This case study describes the complexity of implementing a school-university partnership that reached out to elementary teachers of mathematics in twelve schools located in five rural Southern Illinois communities. A rigorous inservice professional development program was offered in Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI), and forty-five teachers accepted the initial invitation. This proved to be a significant opportunity for the teachers who responded to engage in a journey of meaningful personal and professional learning. Each teacher confronted math anxiety, expanded math content knowledge, and developed new ways to teach and assess student learning in math. The number of teacher participants would grow over time, and the program boasts many successes that we will discuss. Yet many teachers avoided the training opportunity altogether, and wide variations of commitment occurred among the schools. This case study illustrates the contingent character of the implementation processes in educational reform within and between schools. The need for a School-university partnership in Southern Illinois Southern Illinois University-Carbondale (SIUC) serves a large rural region of Illinois that faces the serious challenges of poverty among families that move frequently under poverty’s many stresses during their children’s formative years. One common result of this poverty and mobility is compromised student achievement. Furthermore, low levels of mathematics achievement are a perennial problem. Many rural elementary teachers