Situating Teachers' Instructional Practices in the Institutional Setting of the School and District

In this article, we describe an analytic approach for situating teachers' instructional practices within the institutional settings of the schools and school districts in which they work. In doing so, we draw on an ongoing collaboration with a group of teachers in an urban school district to illustrate both the approach and its usefulness in guiding the development of analyses that feedback to inform such collaborations. The approach involves delineating communities of practice within a school or district and analyzing three types of interconnections between them that are based on boundary encounters, brokers, and boundary objects.