Promising Practices and Areas to Support: An Investigation of First-Year Teachers' Ambitious Mathematics Teaching Practices

• In Event: Beginning Elementary Teachers' Development of Ambitious Instructional Practices in Reading/Language Arts and Mathematics

Abstract

Objective. As efforts to raise learning standards in U.S. schools intensify, beginning teachers (BTs) are increasingly expected to teach ambitiously from the start. For mathematics teacher educators (MTEs), this presents a challenge to prepare new teachers to engage in ambitious practices that foster students’ deep conceptual understanding, problem-solving skills, and application of knowledge to multiple situations (Lampert et al., 2013) and lead students to justify their approaches and clarify their thinking (Franke, Kazemi, & Battey, 2007). Questions remain about what MTEs can continue to do and reconsider in order to best support preservice teachers’ understanding and ability to engage in ambitious instruction.
We know that many factors impact how teaching candidates transition from their pre-service experiences into their roles as beginning teachers in classrooms, including student teaching experiences (Peressini, Borko, Romagnano, Knuth, & Willis, 2004), BTs’ mathematical knowledge for teaching (Desimone, Hochberg, McMaken, 2016), availability of instructional resources (Cohen, Raudenbush, & Ball, 2003), and access to supports, such as formal mentors, teacher colleagues, and instructional coaches (Stanulis & Floden, 2009). Acknowledging these complexities, we examine the kinds of ambitious mathematics practices BTs are able to enact so that MTEs can provide targeted opportunities and support.
Perspective, Data Sources, and Methods. From a larger study examining features of teacher preparation programs, and BTs’ enactment of ambitious instruction, videos of 117 mathematics lessons taught by 43 first-year teachers from four different teacher preparation programs were examined. We share findings from a subset of 15 lessons in which BTs engaged in more advanced ambitious instructional mathematics teaching practices.
All videos were scored using the Mathematics Scan (M-Scan) instrument (Berry et al., 2013) which captures the implementation of four domains of standards-based mathematics teaching practices: tasks, discourse, representations, and coherence of lessons. Within these domains, four teaching practices were highlighted for this project as ambitious practices for beginning teachers: cognitive demand, problem solving, mathematical discourse community, and explanation and justification. We chose 15 lessons that highlighted higher scores.
Findings and Significance. Initial findings suggest several promising instructional practices that BTs are using consistently. Across the 15 lessons analyzed, there were 79 tasks presented. Of these, about 70% were focused on procedures with connections to underlying concepts or non-algorithmic, complex thinking. Discourse was another area of promising practice with about 85% of lessons highlighting consistent opportunities for students to participate and with teachers frequently soliciting students’ ideas and questions. Findings also suggest some areas for continued development for BTs. Only 15% of the 79 tasks in these lessons were open-ended. Additionally, fewer than 40% of the tasks in these lessons allowed students to grapple with the mathematics, and in only 30% were students working on mathematics that did not have an already learned procedure. Based on these findings, we make suggestions for MTEs to focus support for BTs on what it means for a task to be open-ended, the creation of genuine opportunities for students to make quality contributions to lessons through student-to-student talk, and fostering students’ agency in utilizing multiple strategies to solve problems.

Authors

• Holly Henderson Pinter, Western Carolina University

• Jillian M. Cavanna, University of Hartford

• Tutita M. Casa, University of Connecticut