Specifying How to Work Toward Equity in Middle-Grades Mathematics Instructional Improvement Efforts

• In Event: Strategies for Promoting and Studying Equity in Design-Oriented Research-Practice Partnerships

Abstract

This poster focuses on how we have attended to issues of equity in an eight-year design-research RPP, Middle School Mathematics and the Institutional Setting of Teaching (MIST). MIST aims to both understand and contribute to what it takes to improve middle-grades mathematics teaching and learning at the scale of large, urban districts. In 2007, we partnered with four districts that were attempting ambitious instructional improvements aimed at supporting students’ development of conceptual understanding of key mathematical ideas and procedural fluency. Issues of equity were of great concern to district leaders, principals, and teachers. Whereas most practitioners recognized the need to better support students, especially those who had been identified as low-performing, they struggled in knowing, concretely, what to do. This is not surprising, given that the relevant research base was (and, to some extent, still is) thin at the level of concrete practice (for exceptions, see, e.g., Boaler & Staples, 2008; Gutiérrez, 2000; Staples, 2007). Against this background, we initiated efforts to attend to equity with the goals of supporting our partner districts and contributing to the field more generally.

One focus of our work was to specify equity-in-practice. We aimed to identify forms of instructional practice that have the potential to support all students’ participation in rigorous mathematical activity and to develop productive mathematical identities (Martin, 2000). One example is our specification of how to introduce, or launch, complex tasks to support students’ subsequent participation in a lesson (Jackson, Garrison, Wilson, Gibbons, & Shahan, 2013). A second example concerns an analysis of the instructional practice of teachers who engaged their students in conceptually-oriented instruction, and in which their African American students performed better than would be expected on state assessments, given their prior two years of performance (Wilson, Nazemi, & Jackson, 2013). In addition to identifying forms of practice, we considered what is necessary organizationally to support teachers’ development of such practices. For example, we collaborated with district leaders to co-plan and co-design PD aimed at supporting School Leaders to distinguish between a more and less productive launch of a task, and how to provide feedback to teachers regarding their launches.

A second focus of our work concerns attention to equity in research analyses regarding instructional improvement at scale. As an example, we developed an interview-based assessment of teachers’ views of their students’ mathematical capabilities (VSMC; Jackson, Gibbons, & Dunlap, under review). This assessment allowed us to investigate quantitative relations between teachers’ VSMC and other more typical measures of teachers’ knowledge and practice on a large scale. Findings from quantitative analyses of teachers’ views, knowledge and practice across the first four years of MIST suggest that teachers’ VSMC matters for the quality of instruction enacted and who participates, especially in classes composed of mostly non-dominant students (Wilhelm, Munter, & Jackson, under review). These findings suggest the importance of attending to the development of PD designs that pair attention to teachers’ VSMC with learning how to enact ambitious instructional practices.

Authors

• Kara J. Jackson, University of Washington - Seattle

• Paul A. Cobb, Vanderbilt University

• Jonee Wilson, Vanderbilt University

• Mahtab Nazemi, University of Washington - Seattle