Chapter 9: A National Network of Regional Communities of Practice: The COMmunities for Mathematics Inquiry in Teaching (COMMIT) Network

In this chapter, we describe the COMmunities for Mathematics Inquiry in Teaching (COMMIT) Network, which consists of a collection of regional, discipline-specific communities of practice. These communities are centered around the practice of teaching mathematics through inquiry, which necessitates thinking about equity at every level. Each regional community is autonomously governed and provides low-cost professional development and networking opportunities to its members. The national network creates spaces for leaders of the regional communities to share ideas and challenges and for regional professional development facilitators to collaborate and improve together. The major research undertaking of the project adapted the value framework developed by Wenger et al. (2011) to analyze member surveys and regional leader interviews, finding intertwined layers of value at the levels of individual members, regional community leaders, and the network as a whole. That is, we found multiple, important ways that the COMMIT Network supports the regional COMMITs and that the regional COMMITs support instructor members in improving their teaching practice, thus affecting student success. Two central products of the project include an online toolkit for helping new COMMITs get started and a successful expansion of the COMMIT Network with a met goal of increasing diversity along several dimensions. This chapter, which describes many details of the development and structure of our network model, will be useful to change leaders interested in replicating or building upon this model of networked communities of practice.