Teachers' Collaborative Sense-Making About Broadening Student Participation in Mathematics Discussions

• In Event: Understanding Teachers as Learners Through Their Collaborative Sense-Making

Abstract

Purposes and objectives: In this paper, we share results related to teachers’ collective sensemaking about increasing student participation in classroom mathematics discussions. We highlight the cues that teachers identify in relation to broadening participation, the problems of practice that permeate this work, and teachers’ co-constructed responses to these problems.

Theoretical perspectives: We approach teacher learning from a sociocultural perspective as developing in a community of practice (Rogoff, 1995), where teachers engage in collaborative sensemaking—a continuous process that allows for an intersubjective construction of shared meanings and interpretation of one’s environment through conversation (Gephart, Topal, & Zhang, 2010, p. 284).

Methods: The study context is a job-embedded professional development in the form of a Learning Lab (LL) in a school serving a significantly diverse student population. In each LL, participants composed of eight elementary teachers (some from Spanish Dual Language Immersion classrooms) with varied teaching experience, three instructional coaches, and two teacher educators collaboratively prepared a lesson to enact subsequently in a classroom. The enacted lesson was video recorded for use in follow-up debriefs, which conclude with teachers setting individual goals for their ongoing work in classrooms. For this paper, transcripts from four labs were analyzed for themes related to broadening student participation. Guided by our theoretical framework on sensemaking as a process, we looked for the cues and problems of practice that teachers identified in relation to student participation–what facilitates it and what constrains it. We also thematically analyzed the way teachers attended to these problems of practice.

Results: We identified two themes in teachers’ discussions on broadening student participation. First, teachers made sense of ways to honor student thinking in order for students to fully participate in a math talk community. They considered leveraging students’ natural ways of talking and reasoning, marking students’ ideas as “preliminary”, and allowing for alternate forms of discourse. They reasoned that honoring students’ ways of doing mathematics would lower the risk of participating and, potentially, increase the participation of emergent bilinguals and differently-abled students. Concurrently, teachers identified sociomathematical norms (Cobb & Yackel, 1996) or acceptable ways to participate in discussions such as balancing colloquial and mathematically precise language. Second, teachers made sense of ways to increase diversity in student voices, particularly with respect to students of color. They proposed leveraging small group talk as a precursor to whole class discussions. However, they were cautious about the risk of decreasing contributions when discussions moved from small-group to whole-group because students’ identities shift positions with changing contexts (Wood, 2013). To mitigate this risk, teachers identified ways to include non-dominant students’ voices, such as asking students to revoice or represent their peers’ thinking and using group activities that give broad access to participation such as choral counting.

Significance: The insights gleaned from teachers working collectively to facilitate classroom discussion suggest important cues that teachers attend to in their work on broadening participation and how they make sense of and act on problems of practice. Teachers’ collaborative sensemaking revealed shared meanings and problems of practice that permeate their daily practice.

Authors

• Hala N. Ghousseini, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Sam Prough, University of Delaware

• Eric Siy, University of Wisconsin - Madison