Recontextualizing Core Instructional Practices in Beginning Mathematics Teaching

• In Event: Beginning Mathematics Teaching

Abstract

There is growing interest in teacher preparation in focusing on core instructional practices (CIPs) that can be articulated, studied, and rehearsed in a way that also affords novices work on content knowledge and principles of ambitious teaching (Core Practice Consortium, 2013; Lampert et al., 2013). Examples of CIPs include eliciting and responding to student thinking and orienting students’ to each other’s ideas. Opportunities to deliberately practice CIPs with attention to content and guiding principles are thought to support novices in enacting this work in the complex settings of classrooms. Substantiating this claim, however, requires studying the outcomes of such opportunities to determine what beginning teachers can do with CIPs in the transactions they have with diverse students around content.

We report on a study of the classroom practice of six beginning teachers who participated during their teacher preparation in a professional learning model, Learning in, from, and for Teaching Practice (LTP), that focused on CIPs. The LTP model provided repeated opportunities for novices to move back and forth between coached rehearsals of CIPs in the context of instructional activities and actual enactments of these CIPs in elementary classrooms. We examined the ways that the beginning teachers used the CIPs in their own classrooms and the factors that influenced their use in ambitious ways. Using the framework of Accountable Talk (Michaels, O’Connor, & Resnick, 2008) as a way to characterize ambitious teaching, we investigated whether and how the teachers used the CIPs to establish a learning community around mathematical reasoning and sensemaking.

For each teacher, we observed and videotaped, at different times, four mathematics lessons and then interviewed the teacher after each lesson. Our analysis focused on three CIPs that the teachers learned during their teacher preparation: eliciting student thinking, using mathematical representations, and orienting students to each other’s ideas. Using data from the LTP model of teacher preparation, we created descriptors of CIPs (the aspects of the practices that were taught and enacted in LTP), and then used them to create codes using the video analysis software Studiocode. Using these codes, we analyzed the teachers’ lessons for the way the teachers used the CIPs across different lesson segments.

Our preliminary results show that half of the participants used the practices consistently within and across their lessons in ways that support students’ sensemaking around the mathematics and the development of a classroom community around disciplinary practices. Other participants used the practices in ambitious ways inconsistently. Analysis in progress suggests that among the factors that influenced the teachers’ recontextualization of the practices in ambitious ways are the nature of instructional activities in which these practices were enacted and school-level goals and efforts related to the implementation of the common core standards. Our findings point to the role of instructional activities in mediating the enactment of CIPs. In our presentation, we will share other findings and discuss the affordances and limits of examining mathematics instruction at the level of core practices across contexts and teachers.

Authors

• Hala N. Ghousseini, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Aimee Cardon, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Heather Beasley, University of Wisconsin