Dilemmatic Design for Teacher Collaborative Learning: Assisting Professional Vision for Equity

• In Event: Theorizing Teachers' Situated Talk to Disrupt Inequitable Instructional Practice

Abstract

Objectives
Learning to teach equitably is as knotty as equitable teaching itself. We use Lampert’s (1985) “dilemma management” to explore tensions between professional visions of researchers and a 5th-grade team of teachers in Hawai‘i learning to enact equitable classroom talk (ECT). We first examine vision based on Goodwin (1994), followed by an argument for applying dilemma management to the design of materials to support teacher collaborative learning. We argue for dilemmatic design to assist rather than impose professional vision for equity for teachers with analyses of our colleagues’ work in Hawai‘i using formative peer observation rubrics of ECT.

Theoretical perspectives
“Professional vision” concerns the use of coding schemes and material representations to highlight key aspects of professional practice (Goodwin, 1994). Most applications of professional vision to teaching use a best-practice approach whereby researcher vision is imposed on teachers. Yet, issues of equity in teaching—such as connecting with students’ everyday lives, extending students’ ideas, or examining experiences with bias or injustice—are contextual and do not lend themselves to best-practice orientations.

Supporting teacher professional vision for equity, we find, requires a dilemmatic approach. Lampert (1985) showed how most moment-to-moment difficulties in teaching are better approached as dilemmas to be managed rather than problems to be solved. Teaching challenges are dilemmatic when addressing them requires choosing between competing, valid interests—e.g., when modeling language, asking questions, organizing small groups, providing encouragement, extending students’ contributions, etc.

Methods and Data Sources
We use dilemma management to examine the use of observation rubrics to support a team of grade 5 teachers to learn together the notice and enact ECT on O‘ahu. The team met 90 minutes each week during 2021-22 to plan and prepare, examine and debrief, and reflect on and revise lessons based on five observation rubrics.

Teachers decided to focus their ECT lessons on mathematics. All meetings were peer-facilitated using an inquiry protocol to guide their discussions. Researchers, school administrators, an instructional coach, and a teacher aide participated in some meetings as invited guests. We video-recorded and transcribed one teacher meeting per month (n=10). We focus this analysis on two meetings, shortly after teachers shifted from live to videoed observations of one another’s lessons using GoReact software.

Findings
Our analysis shows how grade 5 teachers used ECT rubrics to refine professional visions for equity. Teachers used, questioned, and deviated from project materials to develop moral judgments requisite to provide their students with meaningful opportunities to participate in math discussions. Specific indicators and frequency and intensity distinctions within rubrics a) helped teachers make principled decisions together to reason about and improve their craft while b) realizing how normative dialogic practices are locally significant.

Significance
Grappling with conflicts between professional visions for equity generated noticing, reasoning, and decision-making for teachers to provide students with more meaningful opportunities to participate in math discussions. We identify key tensions among the varied visions of teachers and researchers and describe how a dilemmatic approach to designing materials for teacher collaboration assists rather than imposes professional visions for equity.

Authors

• Bryant Jensen, Brigham Young University
  Presenting Author

• Adam Lefstein, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  Presenting Author

• Aliza Segal, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
  Presenting Author

• Taylor Topham, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author