Persevere, but With What? How Professional Development Resources Support and Hinder Teachers' Sense-Making About Students' Mathematical Perseverance

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Abstract

High school math teachers in a practice-based professional development program worked to increase students’ perseverance with challenging math tasks. This paper examines how resources that teachers used acted as lenses through which they collaboratively made sense of perseverance. The lenses both constrained and opened up their sense-making. The teachers initially examined perseverance through a lens of agency. This lens foregrounded how students interacted with each other and the teacher, but backgrounded richness of the mathematics tasks. Their interaction-based interventions were not effective at building perseverance. When the teachers took up a second lens that also foregrounded mathematical richness, however, their interventions had the desired effect.

Author

• Anna Weltman, University of California - Berkeley