Supporting Generative Change Toward Responsive Teaching: How Teachers Use Classroom Experiences as Instructional Feedback

• In Event: 53.055 - Reflections on Teachers as Learners: Selective Attention, In-the-Moment Decisions, Affect, and Culture

Abstract

Objectives

This paper investigates the process by which secondary mathematics teachers learn from everyday classroom experiences.

Theoretical Framework

Although research shows that teachers learn through experience (Kraft & Papay, 2014), empirical accounts of how this process unfolds on a day-to-day basis are rare (Little, 2012). In one example, Kennedy (2005) highlights how issues faced during a lesson are important contexts for learning, conceptualizing learning through experience as a process of problem-solving. Franke et al. (2001) have also documented the importance of teachers unpacking student thinking in the process of using experiences to improve teaching through generative change. This study aims to identify specific ways teachers generatively use student thinking from everyday classroom experiences to improve their teaching.

Methods and Data

Teachers' in-the-moment noticing of experiences was investigated through point-of-view observations (Sherin, Russ, & Colestock, 2011), where teachers collect video from their point-of-view using wearable cameras. The camera records the previous minute of action when the teacher presses a button on a remote. Teachers were asked to record "moments you want to reflect on or think about later." Immediately following the lesson, the teachers were interviewed about their captured moments.

Twenty-three interviews with three secondary mathematics teachers that were consistently responsive to student mathematical thinking (Pierson, 2008) during observations were analyzed. Each discussion around a recorded moment was the unit of analysis. How teachers' captured experiences were used to develop changes to teaching, or methods of learning through experience, were open coded. This coding concentrated on teachers' sense-making, and implications drawn from the moments, similar to frameworks from teacher noticing (Sherin, Jacobs, & Philipp, 2011) and data use (Coburn & Turner, 2011).

Results

The results highlight two methods identified that do not align with a problem-solving conception of learning through experience.

In instances of making unanticipated successes typical, teachers noticed student thinking that they explicitly identified as unanticipated, but productive. The teacher attempted to understand why students thought in that particular way in order to come up with a change to instruction to either make it more frequent or more likely for other students to think that way.

In instances of mathematizing student misunderstandings, teachers identified student thinking that was incorrect, but found a context or real-world situation when that thinking would be correct. This often led teachers to have students consider the mathematics of the newly identified context and compare this to their current context, positioning student misunderstandings as resources for learning the targeted content.

Scholarly Significance

These findings demonstrate that student thinking identified positively or negatively can be a context for teacher learning. Both methods indicate that teacher learning through experience can be more complicated than simply determining "what works and what doesn't" and how to fix it; the teachers attempted to unpack how and why students thought about mathematics in particular ways. This suggests that learning from experience is broader than problem-solving, and can occur as a result of teachers deeply understanding the classroom context and finding ways to leverage that context for achieving targeted learning goals.

Author

• Elizabeth B. Dyer, Stanford University