Enacting Pedagogies of Practice: Teaching Beginners to Teach Mathematics

• In Event: Understanding and Supporting Teaching Practice: Multiple Perspectives

Abstract

Recent years have seen a continued call for teacher education that focuses more directly on the practice of teaching (Ball & Forzani, 2009; Grossman et al., 2009). This research argues for teacher education that prepares beginning teachers to do key aspects of the work, not simply talk about doing it or analyze someone else’s doing of it. This focus on the teaching of practice requires shifts in both the content of teacher education as well as the development of new teacher-education pedagogies.
This study reports on our efforts to teach beginners to enact teaching practices in “subject-serious” ways. The context for the study is an intensive, integrated mathematics content and methods course for prospective elementary teachers (“interns”). The course was situated in an after-school mathematics program for struggling upper-elementary students that met four days each week. Interns had class sessions with course instructors
and had repeated opportunities to engage in increasingly complex practices, with students, across the semester. The content of the course focused on a core set of “high-leverage
teaching practices” (Ball, Sleep, Boerst, & Bass, 2009) (including setting up mathematics tasks and leading mathematics discussions) and on mathematical knowledge for teaching
(Ball, Thames, & Phelps, 2008) related to representing and comparing fractions as well as to mathematical practices such as explaining and representing. The design of interns’ learning experiences built on Grossman and colleagues’ (2009) framework, which defines “pedagogies of practice in professional education” as comprising three key elements: (1) representations of practice; (2) decompositions of practice; and (3) approximations of practice.
In this study, we analyzed records of practice from the course (e.g., assignments, instructors’ and interns’ lesson plans, videos of interns’ teaching) to examine how the three elements of pedagogies of practice played out in the enactment of the course and how they were shaped by both the subject matter and teaching context. We also analyzed the ways in which the specific mathematics content worked on in the course with interns and taught by interns to the children shaped interns’ opportunities to learn to enact high leverage practices. Based on this analysis, we identified different ways that representations, decompositions, and approximations were implemented in the course at different stages in the trajectory of interns’ learning. We also identified key features of subject-matter topics that seemed to support interns’ learning to do the work of teaching.
Our analysis suggests that the subject-matter topic plays an important role in creating the context for work on particular teaching practices, as well as in scaffolding interns’
enactment of those practices. We conclude by discussing the challenges of enacting pedagogies of practice and suggest directions for future research.
This study contributes to the field’s understanding of the design and implementation of practice-based teacher education. Findings can inform the ways in which practices are
decomposed for teaching beginners, the use of representations of practice in teacher education, and the design and enactment of approximations of practice. In addition, the study provides insight about the selection of subject matter when enacting pedagogies of practice.

Authors

• Laurie Sleep, University of Michigan

• Timothy A. Boerst, University of Michigan