Making Equitable Practices Visible in Elementary Mathematics Teacher Preparation

• In Event: Developing Ambitious Mathematics Teaching With an Equity Stance: Rethinking Routine Practice

Abstract

We report on a collaborative project across multiple university-based teacher education programs. Our aim is to prepare prospective teachers to do the work of teaching in ways that elicit and advance children’s mathematical thinking and that enable children to engage in central mathematical practices (e.g., generalizing, justifying, and modeling relationships). We work with prospective teachers to develop competence and form identities as teachers who engage in ambitious and equitable practices, including: (1) aiming toward a mathematical goal, (2) eliciting and responding to student reasoning, (3) representing mathematical ideas, (4) orienting students to each others’ ideas, and (5) positioning students competently. These practices derive from the growing literature on classroom practices that make a difference for student learning (Franke, Kazemi, & Battey, 2007). Importantly, we believe these practices sit within a view of teaching that underscores the importance of teacher-student relationships and teachers’ efforts to learn from the children and communities they serve.
We have developed a small number of Instructional Activities that "contain" the practices and principles of ambitious and equitable teaching (Lampert & Graziani, 2009). The pedagogies we have developed are enacted in recurrent Cycles of Enactment and Investigation during which teacher educators first support novice teachers in collectively analyzing, planning, and rehearsing the Instructional Activities in a university classroom setting. Novices then 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, 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.
Our paper will draw on (1) video data documenting our methods courses across our institutions and (2) case data following teachers into their student teaching and first year of teaching. We discuss several issues central to the advancement of an equity stance in our work:
1. Our teacher education programs are oriented around principles of equity and social justice. We analyze how equity is framed in our programs, considering what lenses these framings provide for prospective teachers in understanding the role classroom instruction and institutional structures play in perpetuating or interrupting inequities. We consider how our programs frame racial, class, gender disparities in education (Martin, 2000).
2. We analyze our own attempts to make equity an explicit part of our discussion of day-to-day instruction through the way we support novice teachers to develop classroom cultures that position students competently and that orient students to one another and to key mathematical ideas. We discuss to what extent these practices enable us to make visible issues of access, power, and status in classroom interactions among students that support or limit mathematical learning (Civil & Planas, 2004).
3. We analyze how our uses of Instructional Activities serve as mechanisms for prospective teachers to create space in traditional institutional structures to position children successfully.
We end with our future goals to refine our efforts to make equitable practices visible in elementary mathematics teacher preparation.

Authors

• Elham Kazemi, University of Washington

• Megan L. Franke, University of California - Los Angeles