Approximations of Practice and Opportunities to Learn About Student Thinking

• In Event: Approaches to Learning About Student Thinking in Practice-Based Teacher Education

Abstract

Overview and objectives
The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical framing for this symposium, while drawing on empirical findings from a study of teacher learning about student thinking in, from, and for practice. The paper will introduce a theoretical model for understanding teacher learning inside approximations of practice. Then, drawing on findings from a study of teacher learning in a job-embedded professional development, I illustrate these theoretical considerations as they relate to teachers engaging with student thinking inside an approximation of practice.

Theoretical perspectives
Lampert (2010) frames the relationships that teachers manage as they support students’ learning of content as problem spaces that arise in establishing and maintaining relationships with students and subject matter. Problems of practice arise inside these spaces because of the constraints and possibilities that participants generate through their actions during instruction. Research on the development of situationally appropriate knowledge and skill stresses the importance of providing the learner with repeated opportunities to both experience and reflect on corresponding changes between enactments of a skill and resulting consequences. This deliberate practice can engage novices in a form of inquiry during which they actively seek to attend to constraints and possibilities (Cook & Brown, 1999; Hatano & Inagaki, 1986) using knowledge, professional commitments, and skills of teaching.

Methods
The study context is a job-embedded teacher professional development (PD) focused on facilitating math discussions. Each PD engages participants, composed of 8 elementary teachers with varied teaching experience, 3 instructional coaches, and 2 teacher educators, in collaboratively preparing a lesson to enact subsequently in a classroom. The enacted lesson entails several teacher time-outs (TTOs)—pausing instruction to request guidance. It is also video-recorded for use in subsequent debriefs, concluding with teachers setting individual goals for their ongoing work in classrooms. Transcripts from four collaboratively enacted lessons were analyzed for when TTOs occurred and how they allowed for opportunities to learn about student thinking. Opportunities to learn were determined based on the tasks that the teachers engaged in relation to the TTOs and student thinking.

Results
Findings show that TTOs were largely driven by events related to student thinking. Teachers solicited guidance and discussion related scaffolding student thinking (supporting them in clarifying their ideas to the class); representing student thinking; following up on student thinking (what teaching move to follow up with); and interpreting student ideas. Teachers collaboratively made sense of these problem spaces by interpreting student thinking, providing insight into the mathematics and noting affordances and constraints of instructional moves. This happened in a continuous back and forth between collaboratively enacting the lesson and then stopping to reflect on the consequences of their performance, drawing in the process on a body of professional knowledge.

Significance
Embedding work on student thinking inside approximations of practice speaks to the situative and dynamic nature of teacher knowledge, where the deliberate practice of responsiveness to student thinking allows for the development of teachers’ adaptive expertise (Hatano & Inagaki, 1986).

Author

• Hala N. Ghousseini, University of Wisconsin - Madison