Learning Through Teaching: An Exploration of Teachers' Use of Feedback in Support of Responsive Teaching in Mathematics

• In Event: 63.018 - Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Teachers’ sense-making about instructional situations guides their decision-making in significant ways (Horn, 2007; Jacobs, Lamb, & Philipp, 2010; Levin, Hammer, & Coffey, 2009; M. G. Sherin, Jacobs, & Philipp, 2011). In particular, this sense-making influences how a teacher’s instruction changes over time. That is, the way that teachers make sense of and use teaching experiences as feedback, or how teachers learn through teaching, can support or impede teachers’ growth. In this study, I investigate the role that making sense of everyday classroom experience has on a specific type of teacher growth — the process of teacher change towards responsive teaching in secondary mathematics. In doing so this study focuses on the following research question: How do secondary mathematics teachers use their everyday classroom experiences as feedback in ways that support growth towards responsive teaching?
Responsive teaching encompasses the “practices of attending and responding to the substance of student thinking, as it unfolds in the particular class” (Hammer, Goldberg, & Fargason, 2012, p. 355). This perspective highlights the need for teachers to attend to and draw out the substance of students’ thinking, as well as choose instructional responses based on the teachers’ understanding of that thinking (Franke et al., 2009; Lineback, in press; Pierson, 2008).
To investigate the way that teachers use classroom experiences as feedback, data from six secondary mathematics teachers are analyzed. A series of 4-10 observations with each teacher were completed over at least two months to uncover the process of teacher change over time. The teachers were purposefully sampled to obtain teachers that had well-established responsive teaching practices (i.e. had previously gone through the process of learning through teaching), and teachers that are currently in the process adopting responsive teaching practices (i.e. are currently undergoing the process of learning through teaching).
Teachers’ in-the-moment sense making was investigated through point-of-view observations (see B. L. Sherin & Sherin, 2010; M. G. Sherin, Russ, & Colestock, 2011; M. G. Sherin, Russ, Sherin, & Colestock, 2008). In this innovative methodology teachers collect video from their point-of-view using small wearable cameras. The camera allows wearers to record the previous one minute of action when they press a button. Prior to instruction teachers were asked to record “moments you might want to reflect on or think about later” by pressing the button. Shortly after the lesson, the teachers were interviewed about their captured moments to uncover what they noticed, how they interpreted those moments, and how those experiences will influence what they plan to do in the future as a teacher.

Author

• Elizabeth B. Dyer, Northwestern University