The Role of Subject Matter in Learning to Leverage Student Thinking in Math and Science Teaching

• In Event: Learning Ambitious Teaching: Cases From Across the Disciplines

Abstract

Purpose:
We examine the role played by elementary teacher candidates’ relationships to subject matter in learning to attend to student thinking in mathematics and science methods coursework (including teaching in field experiences). We consider the ways in which content knowledge and backgrounds become consequential within contingencies of student interactions in disciplinary contexts.

Perspective(s)/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, including eliciting, analyzing and interpreting, and responding to student ideas and reasoning (Franke & Chan, 2007; Kazemi, Franke & Lampert, 2009).

Methods & data sources:
Data are drawn from semester-long, concurrent, math and science methods courses for elementary teacher candidates in a graduate-level certification program explicitly designed to promote teaching as active responsiveness to student thinking and participation. Data includes audio and video records of course meetings and course assignments (written reflections and activities involving analyses of students’ thinking; field-based assignments involving instructional design and implementation; analytic cases of their students’ disciplinary thinking and learning; and observations of teaching). 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, from which several 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 participants.

Warrants for arguments/point of view:
Comparative cases of the same preservice teachers learning to teach math 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:
This work points to the importance of teacher candidates’ relationships to the disciplines they are expected to teach for their enactments of “ambitious” teaching practices (Franke, Kazemi, Battey, 2007; Kazemi, Franke, & Lampert, 2009). These relationships are often deeply rooted in teacher candidates’ experiences as learners and doers of those disciplines and may be vastly different across disciplines. This suggests that an elementary teacher candidate’s identity(ies) as “teacher” may be multiple and even contradictory. Since elementary teachers teach multiple subject areas and often do not have strong backgrounds in mathematics and science, elementary teacher education 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. Further, this work suggests the importance of supporting leveraging student thinking in ways that promote coherence of meaning particularly for elementary teacher education where coherence of pedagogical orientation across disciplines is crucial yet differences in disciplinary epistemology, knowledge and identity need to be accounted for.

Authors

• Janet E. Coffey, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

• Ann R. Edwards, Carnegie Foundation