Supporting Prospective Teacher Learning of Ambitious and Equitable Mathematics Instruction

• In Event: Tools and Routines for Preparing STEM Teachers

Abstract

Purpose: We report on a design, development, and research project across three university-based teacher education programs. Our aim is to prepare prospective teachers to do the work of teaching in ways that result in academic learning for all students. We work with prospective teachers to develop competence in a core set of ambitious and equitable practices: (1) preparing for instruction toward a mathematical goal, (2) attending to pace and student motivation, (3) assessing students’ understanding, (4) establishing and maintaining expectations, (5) eliciting and responding to student reasoning, (6) representing mathematical ideas, (7) orienting students to each other’s ideas, and (8) positioning students competently.

Perspective: Mathematics educators have developed a rich repertoire of pedagogies of investigation (Grossman & McDonald, 2008) that center teacher education on the study of artifacts of practice, such as student work, lesson plans, and classroom video. What remains to be developed are pedagogies of practice that help prospective teachers learn to do the work of teaching in the context of methods courses, while simultaneously investigating key elements of ambitious instruction and what they afford for student learning. We have developed pedagogies of practice centered on the use of a small, carefully chosen set of instructional activities that are accessible and doable by novices across elementary grade levels. The Instructional Activities "contain" the practices and principles of ambitious teaching. When enacted within an Instructional Activity, high-leverage practices become generative for prospective teacher learning. For example, the protocols for one instructional activity directs teachers to lead and record a count in with children in order to identify, use, and justify the numerical patterns that emerge in the count. Another instructional activity involves posing a set of strategically selected mental computations in order for children to discuss the meaning of operations and efficient algorithmic strategies to do the computation.

Methods: The pedagogies we have developed are enacted in recurrent Cycles of Enactment an Investigation during which teacher educators first support novice teachers in collectively analyzing, planning, and rehearsing the instructional activities in a university classroom setting. Novices have the opportunity to enact these activities with children in classroom contexts. Central to this cycle is our use of in-the-moment feedback and deliberate guidance during rehearsal, enabling prospective teachers to enact key practices of ambitious mathematics instruction while teacher educators scaffold their learning about the management of complex relationships among teaching, students, and content.

Data sources: We draw on video data documenting the mathematics methods course over two years at one of the 3 participating institutions.

Results: Our poster will illustrate how the routine interactional structures within one instructional activity serve as tools to learn the set of ambitious and equitable practices that are the focus of our work with novice teachers.

Scholarly significance: To trace the use of instructional activities in our work and to illustrate a developing practice, we will present how we engage novice teachers to learn core practices of ambitious teaching through the use of one Instructional Activity in one Cycle of Enactment and Investigation.
IRB Approval: Yes

Authors

• Elham Kazemi, University of Washington

• Adrian Cunard, University of Washington

• Kate Crowe, University of Washington