Representing Practice to Support Teachers’ Learning About Students’ Thinking, Teaching, and Social Studies Inquiry

• In Event: Representations of Practice to Scaffold Teacher Learning to Enact Equitable and Disciplinary Classroom Discussions

Abstract

Purposes and Perspectives. We report on the ways representations of practice support teachers’ exploration of students’ thinking and discussion during inquiry in social studies. Our context is Learning Labs for Social Studies (LLSS), classroom-embedded professional development (PD) rooted in work in mathematics (Kazemi et al., 2018). LLSS involves cycles of collaboration in planning, enactment (“co-teaching”), and reflection as teachers consider their students’ learning (McDonald, Kazemi, & Kavanagh, 2013). We conceptualize teacher learning as change in instructional practice, teacher thinking, and student outcomes and recognize that teachers learn through active engagement with content and colleagues over time, focused on work aligned with their everyday demands (Desimone et al., 2015).
Method and Data Sources. We used Design-Based Research (Brown, 1992) to study teachers’ thinking as they learned to teach social studies inquiry through LLSS. In the context of a summer school for bilingual students new to English and the U.S., 14 teachers learned to support students’ inquiry learning through translanguaging (Author, 2021). Through iterative coding of videorecorded and transcribed teacher interactions during multiple learning cycles, we identified records of practice that were generative of deeper understanding of disciplinary practices, student thinking, and equitable discussion.
Findings and Significance. Three kinds of records of practice supported teachers’ learning: 1) records that supported co-teaching in classrooms (e.g., video of prior LLSS co-teaching, example prompts to support co-teaching, drafts of lesson plans); 2) records that exemplified target teaching practices (e.g., prompts to elicit student thinking, video of instructional practices from prior LLSS, tools that support students in disciplinary practices including analyzing sources and developing arguments), and 3) records that represented students’ identities and thinking (e.g., prompts to notice student thinking and representations of that thinking; students’ products that oriented teachers to who they are, centering their meaning-making resources; examples of student growth over time).
We focus here on representations of the disciplinary work of crafting arguments based on evidence from sources through teacher modeling; and representations of the criteria for evaluating arguments through guided reflection. We report how teachers talked about these representations as they planned and together enacted lessons using translanguaging with middle school multilingual learners with low English proficiency. We show how the dialogue engendered through these representations supported teachers’ learning during all phases of LLSS.
During planning and co-teaching, the representations engaged teachers in dialogue with each other and with students that heightened teachers’ understanding of the disciplinary goals. While debriefing, teachers made specific observations about students’ thinking and participation in dialogue that honored the diversity of responses and students’ agency in choice of language. We also report on moments of tension when teachers encountered dilemmas related to revoicing students’ contributions, navigating translanguaging, and negotiating understandings about ‘right answers’ and argumentation in social studies. We conclude that authentic representations of practice generated through PD that involved teachers in collectively enacting instruction to support disciplinary learning and dialogue supported teachers’ learning about students, about the discipline, and about teaching inquiry.

Authors

• Chauncey Monte-Sano, University of Michigan

• Mary J. Schleppegrell, University of Michigan