Teachers’ Dilemmatic Sensemaking as a Source of Knowledge Making: Explaining to Process and Explaining to Explore (Poster 3)

• In Event: Research on STEM Professional Learning Communities: Attending to Teacher Learning, Agency, and Equity

Abstract

Purpose. Teacher education often focuses on routine practice, yet responsive practice is definitionally non-routine. To better understand non-routine practice, we analyze two cases of experienced secondary mathematics teachers seeking ways to respond to their students. By understanding this dilemmatic sensemaking, we can better support educators in developing responsive practice.

Theoretical Framework. We define dilemmas as “conflict filled situations that require choices because competing, highly prized values cannot be satisfied” (Cuban, 1992, p. 6). Teachers’ dilemmatic sensemaking is thus a form of teacher learning, producing new understandings of and approaches to navigating tensions. We operationalize such learning by looking at shifts in teachers’ pedagogical judgment –– interactions between pedagogical action, pedagogical reasoning, and pedagogical responsibility (Horn & Garner, 2022). Interactions among these are complex, with reasoning bridging action and responsibility. Ideally, professional learning communities provide spaces for teachers to articulate reasoning, reflecting on dilemmas that arise. (Horn & Garner, 2022).

Methods. Participants are secondary mathematics teachers in a professional development organization (PDO) aimed at supporting equitable and ambitious math instruction. Data come from a research practice partnership designed to support the PDO’s work with teachers. Together, we developed a co-inquiry process for teachers’ questions about their instruction. Supported by video and visual representations of teachers’ movement over single lessons, debrief discussions provide teachers opportunities to investigate aspects of instruction that they care about.

Through the debrief records, we examined teachers’ dilemmatic sensemaking. We illustrate two sensemaking patterns — explaining to process and explaining to explore — through two sensemaking episodes. The focal teachers differ in years of experience and their central dilemmas: Sofia taught between 5-10 years and focused on changes following COVID, while Clark taught for over 20 years and focused on dilemmas in assigning grades. We transcribed and analyzed the focal episodes, using discourse analysis to understand collective dilemmatic sensemaking.

Results. Both teachers grounded their dilemmatic sensemaking in explanations of tensions they experienced, but subsequent discussions differed. In Sofia’s debrief, explanations prompted emotional processing, wherein colleagues made sense of changes in the realities of teaching before, during and after COVID-19 in ways that centered their and their students’ emotional experiences. Clark’s explanation, in contrast, prompted exploration of alternative pedagogical possibilities regarding his grading system, while maintaining his goal to prepare students for the AP Calculus exam.

The temporal orientations differed across the cases. Sofia and colleagues reflected on past experiences to make sense of present classroom reality. Although Clark also reflected on past experiences, they became a knowledge source to re-imagine possible futures involving changed grading practice. Both episodes afforded opportunities to realign pedagogical responsibilities with pedagogical actions, yet the resultant learning qualitatively differed.

Significance. Earlier scholarship pointed to the importance of turning toward practice in teacher workgroup conversations (Horn & Little, 2010) and of the conceptual consequences of how teacher talk unfolds (Horn et al., 2017). This analysis furthers understanding of teachers’ collaborative talk by identifying learning processes grounded in dilemmatic sensemaking. This work points to a need to attend to the dilemmatic nature of teaching to enable educators in developing responsive practice.

Authors

• Karen Underwood, Vanderbilt University

• Ilana S. Horn, Vanderbilt University

• Miles Borowsky, Paul Public Charter School