Role of Subject Matter in Preservice Teachers’ Enactment of Attending to Student Thinking and Participation

• In Event: Tools and Routines for Preparing STEM Teachers

Abstract

Purposes: This paper offers an analysis of preservice elementary teachers learning to attend to student thinking in both mathematics and science. We examined mathematics and science methods coursework in a graduate-level certification program explicitly designed to promote teaching as active responsiveness to student thinking and participation. Comparative cases reveal that the same prospective teachers often differently enacted attending to student thinking and participation, for reasons related to their orientation towards, and relationship with, the disciplines of mathematics and science. Understanding patterning across discipline areas is particularly important for elementary teacher education, as it seeks to prepare teachers to teach multiple subject areas.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework: We situate this work within efforts to establish more empirically-grounded and practice-based accounts of pedagogical content knowledge (Ball & Bass 2003; Ball, Thames & Phelps, 2007; Borko & Putman, 2000). We align with work that seeks to better understand and support prospective teacher learning of “high leverage” practices within disciplinary areas (Franke & Chan, 2006; Ball & Forzani, 2010). We consider the ways in which content knowledge and backgrounds become consequential within contingencies of student interactions in disciplinary contexts.

Methods and modes of inquiry: Data is drawn from semester-long, concurrent, mathematics and science methods courses, including artifacts generated in participants’ field placements. Analyses sought to systematically examine the nature of differences and similarities across subject areas. Iterative coding yielded several categories and revealed patterns of variation across participants. Several participant cases were chosen for closer analysis that either represented typical patterns or that contrasted to prevailing patterns. Categories were then used to structure a closer comparative analysis of parallel assignments and participation in course activities for selected cases.

Data sources and evidence: Analysis draws on data from 25 consenting teacher candidates. Data include audio and video records of course meetings and course assignments (written reflections and activities involving analyses of students’ scientific and mathematical thinking; field-based assignments involving instructional design and implementation; analytic cases of their students’ disciplinary thinking and learning; and observations of teaching).

Results: This work suggests that practices of attending have disciplinary grounding and therefore do not necessarily transfer across disciplinary contexts. Comparative cases of the same preservice teachers learning to teach mathematics and science reveal differing enactments of attending to students’ disciplinary thinking. Orientations to the discipline and to discipline-specific teaching were particularly salient for understanding emergent practices of attending to students’ thinking.

Scholarly significance of the study: Better understanding the ways disciplinary dynamics influence how preservice teachers learn to teach in disciplinary contexts is important for teacher education. Since elementary teachers teach multiple subject areas and often do not have strong backgrounds in mathematics and science, elementary teacher education, in particular, should consider how disciplinary orientations can be leveraged to foster deep reconsideration of the discipline and disciplinary teaching that attends and responds to student thinking.

Authors

• Janet E. Coffey, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

• Ann R. Edwards, University of Maryland - College Park