The NORCAN schools represent a microcosm of the diversity and complexity that characterizes the pedagogical challenges and opportunities encountered by mathematics educators globally. In order to acknowledge this reality while attending to the shared protocols and commitments to solid research outlined in The Norway-Canada Research Partnership - Mindful Leadership for Teaching and Learning in Mathematics, a proven action research model for facilitating professional inquiry is offered in the following. This model, initially developed by the action research work of Luce-Kapler (1997) was also the basis for a collaborative literacy assessment project focussed on building assessment capacity in early literacy development (Alberta Teachers’ Association, 2008).

In this project, the four-cornered template provided a scaffold for sharing and linking participant reflections during the course of the two year project. The template incorporated individual reflections, school-site reports and a final summary provincial report that evaluated the project’s impact on student learning and teacher professional practice. This four-corner writing space offers a powerful analytical framework for bringing together the multiple ways that practitioners’ professional identities and instructional practice are informed and implicated by a variety of variables: individual practitioner attributes, school and community characteristics. These of course all contribute to the collective histories of those involved in professional inquiry and ultimately shape the contours of the work of collaborative inquiry.

These four texts of action research remind us that authentic leadership in assessment is about helping teachers cross the boundary between self and other, me and not me, known and unknown in order to improve their instructional practice.  

This template also offers possibilities for bringing together the rich data that will be collected over the course of the NORCAN project as participants move through the three dimensions of transformational leadership identified in the NORCAN Research Framework that focus on building the capacity to think ahead, lead across and deliver within. 

Both the four corner template for action research and the three dimensions of transformational leadership will focus our collective efforts to address the over-riding question for the NORCAN partnership : How can an international network of schools and educators committed to mindful leadership help to identify obstacles to students’ mathematics learning and develop strategies for attaining success? As each school team develops and explores its own particular line of inquiry under this umbrella question, hopefully these conceptual tools will assist in the focussing and documenting the work ahead.