Teachers’ Negotiation Moves When Scaffolding Group Work

• In Event: Using Systemic Functional Linguistics to Study Mathematics Classroom Discourse

Abstract

This paper focuses on using systemic functional linguistics to examine teachers’ interactions with students during group work. Group work puts unique demands on the teacher. When students are working in groups, the teacher must manage conversations with individual students, with different groups in the class, and with the whole class (Lampert, 2001). Teachers may stifle students’ interaction if they provide too much structure in the set-up of a task (Cohen, 1994). In addition, teachers’ direct instruction may diminish the amount of communication between students (Cohen, 1994; Cohen, Lotan, & Leechor, 1989) and can lead to the decline of high-level tasks (Stein, Grover, & Henningsen, 1996).

In our paper, we ask: How do teachers scaffold group work during a problem-based lesson? We focus on analytic scaffolding, which pertains to teachers’ assistance to students in their development of mathematical ideas (Williams & Baxter, 1996; Nathan & Knuth, 2003). We use data from six geometry class periods taught by two geometry teachers. We examined resources from the system of Negotiation (Love & Suherdi, 1996; Martin, 1992; Martin & Rose, 2007; Veel, 1999; Ventola, 1987, 1988) that the teachers used when assisting the groups. We parsed the transcripts into Negotiation moves, and then coded each move according to its specific function (e.g. asking a question, giving information, providing a clue, or adding more information). We contrasted the different teachers and also the different levels (honors vs. regular).

We found variations between the teachers in the ways in which exchanges were initiated either by the students or by the teacher. We also found the teachers were positioned as experts in the vast majority of exchanges, which is consistent with research findings about the persistence of the I-R-F pattern of interaction in whole group discussions. We also found that the teacher scaffolding included providing clues to solve the problem and, also, performing what we call meta-discursive moves, which made explicit students’ responsibilities during the problem-based lesson. Moreover, teachers’ performance of moves to expand students’ comments was a key element for scaffolding students’ work by specifying elements needed for solving the problem. The students’ performance of moves showed different spaces where they controlled the timeliness and the content of the teachers’ scaffolds. In addition, by performing a new move that we call “request to slow down” the students showed their desire to control the pace at which information was provided.

The paper intends to contribute to the literature that uses systemic functional linguistics to examine mathematics teachers’ discursive moves (Mesa & Chang, 2010; O’Halloran, 1998; Wagner & Herbel-Eisenmann, 2008). Ultimately, our goal is to find resources to support teachers’ work of granting conceptual agency (Cobb, Gresalfi, & Hodge, 2009; Pickering, 1995) to students. When students have conceptual agency they are accountable for identifying the concepts, the procedures, and the strategies needed to work on a problem. By describing teachers’ current practices, we hope to start a conversation about ways to help teachers improve their work scaffolding students’ work during problem-based instruction (Stein, Boaler, & Silver, 2003).

Authors

• Gloriana Gonzalez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Anna Fricano DeJarnette, University of Cincinnati