Angel Bohannon ^1* Caitlin Farrell ² Spencer Cook ^3*

• ¹ NORC at The University of Chicago, Chicago, United States
• ² University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, United States
• ³ Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, United States

Under federal policy guidelines, school districts are increasingly expected to engage with research evidence to guide their efforts around instructional improvement. This article explores how a continuous improvement research-practice partnership (CI RPP) can create opportunities for educators to learn new research-based ideas and practices required to carry out ambitious instructional reforms. We present a year-long case study of two small rural districts engaged in a CI RPP focused on mathematics education. First, we show how research-based mathematics ideas introduced by research partners were taken up by teachers, school leaders, instructional coaches, and district leaders. Then, we describe how the county office of education created important opportunities for learning through a boundary infrastructure: the network of people, practices, and objects that supported the movement of ideas between research, practice, and CI communities. Importantly, we found that the county office’s efforts to broker knowledge did not just involve overcoming or transcending boundaries but also maintaining boundaries in cases where they perceived external partners to be “overstepping.”