Learning in, From, and for Teaching Practice: A Practice-Based Design for Teacher Preparation to Advance an Equity Agenda

• In Event: Redesigning Teacher Education as a Practice-Based Venture: Lessons and Challenges

Abstract

We report on the design and implementation of a model for “Learning Teaching in, from, and for Practice” (LTP), in which we work simultaneously on developing teachers’ skill, knowledge, and commitment to designing and implementing instruction for all children to have equitable access to rigorous academic work in school. The model focuses on the practice of teaching as a collective endeavor drawing on shared core practices to continually improve students’ performance and understanding. Two main components guide our design: (1) a Cycle of Investigation and Enactment in which novice teachers move between interactions with learners and work on their own learning in the context of rehearsals, (2) Instructional Activities (IAs) which are containers for core practices, principles and mathematics that teachers need to learn.

Cycles of Investigation and Enactment enable us to engage teachers in unpacking practice and interrogate it from an equity lens, where we discuss issues of language, positioning, and privileging that both teachers and teacher educators deem important to address. We examine, for instance, how a particular teacher move impacts students’ participation (“Who gets to participate, how, and why?”) The Cycles revolve around the use of a small, carefully chosen set of IAs where teachers work on the practices and principles of ambitious teaching in relation to each other and in relation to students, content, and context. The practices that teachers work on include, among others, preparing for instruction, managing student engagement, eliciting and responding to student contributions, representing student thinking verbally and on the board, etc. The principles that guide the implementation of these practices in everyday teaching are conceived with the aim of maximizing students’ access to learning important mathematics with meaning and using that mathematics to solve problems.

We have collected a range of data in the form of video records of rehearsals and enactments of IAs and analytic reflections written by the beginning teachers. With this data, we explore how IAs allow teachers to attend to children’s ideas and give them voice in the classroom, and how the participation structures enabled by these IAs in the classroom position students competently and enable them to orient to one another’s ideas and meaningful mathematics. Our developing work suggests that our design provided opportunities for teachers to understand the idea that equity (or inequity) becomes manifested, in part, in interaction, including the subtle ways teachers position students, pose problems, ask questions, and follow up on children’s contributions. In this symposium, we share our work on this model and findings, and discuss some of the challenges that we grapple with in relation to how to bring equity more to the forefront in the interactions of student, content, and pedagogy. We aim in our work to contribute to a shared understanding of how teacher educators can support novice teachers in beginning to develop equitable spaces in their mathematics classrooms by providing them with practice-based skills, and how IAs can be used as transformative spaces for new forms of participation in our methods courses and in schools.

Authors

• Hala N. Ghousseini, University of Wisconsin - Madison

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

• Angela Chan Turrou, University of California - Los Angeles