Realising Opportunities for Mathematics Research in a School Alliance: Working as a Collaborative Team to Support Teachers to Strengthen Practice in Meaningful Ways

The Deakin Alliance are local school networks that foster a team-based approach to supporting pre-service teacher (PST) professional learning through the efforts of Site Directors and education academics as Academic Mentors. An underpinning assumption of the Deakin Alliance is that to competently prepare PSTs to enter the profession, the schools in which PSTs undertake professional experience should enable them to apply research-informed practice in the relevant disciplines. However, this ‘ideal’ does not always transpire and these Alliance teams often struggle to realise opportunities for meaningful research that might usefully inform the subject-specific practices of both pre-service and in-service teachers. In this chapter, we explore how we collaborated as education academics and Site Director, and consider how this approach presented a methodological opportunity to expand our role of Academic Mentors to build capacity of in-service teachers and work collaboratively to enhance school practices in mathematics through research-informed practice. We outline the affordances of this methodology to strengthen the Deakin Alliance, support the growth of PSTs and teacher leaders in mathematics (TLMs), and empower us as academics to undertake meaningful work that makes a difference.