The Impact of the Lead-Teacher Professional Learning Community Within the Rice University Mathematics Leadership Institute (MLI)
The MLI's professional learning community that emerged during the first Summer Leadership Institute among 1st cohort participant lead teachers embodies the characteristics of a sustaining and coherent knowledge community (Craig, 1995), where teachers are able to share their secret "stories of practice in safe places . . . in order to make their personal practical knowledge explicit to themselves and to others" (p. 668). Frequently knowledge communities are formed as a result of informal collaboration among people with common interests and goals. We will share how this knowledge community came to be, through formal participation and collaboration in the MLI's intensive summer leadership institutes and later, through informal means. The knowledge community sustained itself through frequent meetings between two summer institutes and continues to sustain itself today.
