Using Video to Support Math Teachers to Learn to Notice Students' Strengths

• In Event: 75.019 - Advancing the Knowledge Base to Improve Teaching: Generating a Design Framework for Video-Based Activity Systems

Abstract

This poster describes the design features of a video club that supports secondary math teachers to notice and name students’ mathematical strengths in the moments when they are learning in small, heterogeneous groups. The participating teachers are from two urban districts and three public schools in the Pacific Northwest who were engaged in a multi-year, multi-dimensional, professional development network (Author, 2014) aimed at learning about and sustaining complex instruction (CI) (Cohen & Lotan, 1994) within their departments. Complex instruction is a strength-based model of teaching and learning. In addition to several other curricular and instructional practices, CI requires teachers to publicly name students’ intellectual strengths as a means of disrupting assumptions of competence that often motivate students’ choices about how to participate. This practice of naming strengths necessitates an ability to first notice them, which can be difficult to do for many reasons. This bi-monthly video club was designed to explicitly attend to such challenges and support teachers to transfer their noticing skills into their classrooms.
This poster and the accompanying discussion will describe complex instruction, the goals of this pedagogy and its curricular and instructional components. The poster will also include a brief overview of the professional development program in which the video club is situated and a description of the six learning spaces that we facilitate to support math departments to learn about, implement and sustain complex instruction at their sites. In addition to the larger context, I will share the video club design and protocol we use to frame how this professional community engages with video and with each other. I will share our decisions about filming, editing and selecting video that makes students’ math strengths available to teachers for noticing and describe how we prepare teacher leaders from the larger PD network to co-facilitate video club as a means of developing distributed leadership and expertise across school sites.
I will use artifacts from one video club meeting to highlight particular ways in which teachers reframed students’ learning behaviors as intellectual strengths and provide examples of shifts in teachers’ perceptions about student participation and mathematical sense making. In particular teachers noticed strengths more frequently over time and the language they used to name strengths became more specific and relevant. Finally, I will share how we use status generalization theory (Berger, Cohen & Zelditch, 1972), to inform many of the decisions we make while working with adult learners as a means of promoting more equitable participation and increase learning for all.

Author

• Lisa M. Jilk, Self-employed