Leveraging Teaching Simulations to Learn about Preservice Teachers' Diagnostic Skills

• In Event: Opportunities and Challenges Associated With Approximations of Practice in Teacher Education Programs

Abstract

Objectives & Perspectives
Teachers constantly make sense of students’ words, written work, and actions and use the interpretations they formulate as the basis for subsequent courses of action. Interpreting student thinking underpins Cognitively Guided Instruction (Carpenter et al., 1996) and the use of learning trajectories to guide teaching (Clements & Sarama, 2014). The soundness and functionality of teachers’ diagnoses of student thinking are consequential; they directly impact students’ subsequent opportunities. To support work in teacher preparation on interpreting student thinking, teacher educators need ways to assess preservice teachers’ (PSTs’) developing skills.

Given the limitations of prevailing approaches to assess interactive teaching practices (c.f., authors, xxxx; authors & colleague, xxxx), the field needs new options that support seeing PTs in action and controlling the conditions in ways that assure the collection of information needed to assess PTs’ skill. Other practice-focused professions such as nursing (e.g., Wilford & Doyle, 2006) and dentistry (e.g., Yoshida et al., 2009), routinely make use of simulations to navigate these goals and challenges. While not fully representing the context of professional practice, the simulation is able to evoke authentic performances in a context that is standardized to enhance what teacher educators can learn about their PSTs with an eye toward the design of subsequent learning opportunities (Dotger, 2014).

Methods and Data Sources
We will feature data collected through teaching simulations with PSTs (N=12). The simulation involves three parts. First, PSTs analyze a piece of student work and prepare to ask questions of the student. Second, PSTs have five minutes to interact with the simulated student to elicit and probe the student’s process and understanding. To ensure consistency, the teacher educator in the role of the student is guided by a protocol with carefully articulated rules for reasoning and responding, including responses to questions that are commonly asked by PSTs. We deliberately have the student share particular parts of their process and understanding even if they are not prompted for the information in order to ensure that PSTs have sufficient evidence to interpret the student’s thinking later. Third, the PSTs are asked to interpret the student’s thinking, including their process and understanding. We will focus on the diagnostic work that PSTs do as the basis for generating questions and making claims about what students know, understand, and can do mathematically.

Results
These PSTs were able to describe the student’s steps accurately for solving the problem. Describing the student’s understanding proved to be more challenging. Some of the PSTs were focused on the student’s understandings of ideas/steps that are at the core of the student’s process. Others focused on more peripheral understandings. There was a great deal of variety in PSTs’ use of evidence as grounds for their interpretations.

Significance
Our study illustrates the potential of the use of teaching simulation to learn about PSTs’ interpreting skills. Further, it illuminates some of the challenges for novices as they learn to make sense of student thinking.

Authors

• Meghan M. Shaughnessy, Boston University

• Timothy A. Boerst, University of Michigan

• Kristen Pynes, University of Michigan