Navigating the Complexities of Promoting Student Voice and Agency Through Collaborative Design of Problem-Based Lessons

• In Event: Noticing and Responding to Student Thinking for Equity

Abstract

Purposes
Problem-based mathematics instruction has been conceptualized as a way to foster students' collaborative learning, authority, and agency (Nieminen et al., 2022). However, its implementation does not always align with these goals. This paper takes an asset-based approach toward mathematics teachers, to explore how they can be better engaged in equitable problem-based instruction (Turner et al., 2012), by examining the complexities teachers encounter when collaboratively designing a lesson that aims to promote student agency. The collaborative design process challenges teachers to increase attentiveness and responsiveness to student ideas. The paper calls for further problematization of teachers’ complex work when promoting student voice.

Perspectives
Practical Rationality (Author et al., 2012, 2016) is a theory which describes mathematics teachers' decision-making as responsive to not only personal resources (e.g. knowledge, beliefs) but also social resources including the four professional obligations: to the discipline of mathematics, to students as individuals, to the interpersonal dynamics of the classroom as a microcosm of society, and to the schooling institution.
We utilize this theory to examine how teachers handle the "construction, organization, and distribution of intellectual authority among students" (Langer-Osuna, 2017, p. 224). Furthermore, we emphasize that teachers' collaborative discourse on these conflictual decisions is essential to their professional learning (Horn & Kane, 2019).

Context and Methods
We present data from the XXXX program (Authors, 2018), where teachers collaboratively design a single lesson. Through scripting and visualizing key decisions in the lesson, teachers weigh their advantages, disadvantages, and consequences. Scripting of teacher-students interactions serves as a mechanism to relate teachers’ noticing and deciding how to respond to students.
The corpus for this analysis are three activities relating to launching and redirecting responsive tasks. We coded the corpus according to justifications about noticing and acting for students' agency, mapping them to the different obligations.

Results
We identified conflicting patterns in teachers’ discourse about whether to frame a problem after an instructional situation, such as construction, or whether to present it as a novel problem. Arguments supporting no framing were aimed at promoting agency (the individual obligation) and highlighting generalizability (disciplinary). However, counter arguments emphasized the importance of establishing a common language (interpersonal); ensuring the class reaches the theorem by the lesson's end (institutional); and preventing confusion (individual).
Overall, teachers' considerations for promoting or limiting agency are grounded in their obligation to address students' needs, resulting in decisions that aim to balance both stances.

Significance
Analyzing teachers' arguments in various activities revealed that framing tasks to promote epistemic agency is a delicate balancing act (Author, 2002). By focusing on the mathematical and institutional situatedness of problem-based instruction, we demonstrate how conflicting obligations shape teachers’ noticing and responsiveness.
Our work highlights the importance of designing lessons in ways that: 1) provide students with ample participation opportunities; 2) enable teachers’ responsiveness; 3) allow teachers to build upon non-normative ideas. We claim to further unpack the viability of what teachers do when navigating conflicting demands, and our work aims at disrupting deficit perspectives about teachers’ daily work while advocating for student agency.

Authors

• Gil Schwarts, Weizmann Institute of Sciecne

• Patricio G. Herbst, University of Michigan

• Amanda Marie Milewski, University of Michigan