Seeing and Doing: The Relationship Between Elementary Teachers’ Instructional Vision and Practice within Classroom Discussion

• In Event: Insights from Examining and Comparing Elementary Teachers’ Visions Across Content Areas

Abstract

Objectives
The relationship between teachers' visions and their enacted pedagogies is complex, especially when teaching practices, like dialogic discussion, may run counter to historical, cultural, or curricular views of instruction (Howe & Abedin, 2013). This analysis builds on this body of scholarship to investigate, within a PL program focused on developing dialogic pedagogies across mathematics and ELA, the relationship between how teachers envision and enact classroom discussions across content areas over time. We ask:
What, if at all, is the relationship between a teacher’s vision of classroom discussion and their observed teaching practice?
How, if at all, do their visions and practice change over time as they participate in a PL program?

Perspectives
We draw on two bodies of literature: (1) research studying discussion pedagogy and participation (e.g., Kavanagh & Rainey, 2017; Kazemi & Cunard, 2016; Reisman et al., 2018), and (2) scholarship on teachers' visions, or their "images of ideal classroom practice" (Hammerness, 2001, p. 143; Munter, 2014) and the relationship between instructional visions and enacted practice (Munter & Correnti, 2017; Vaughn, 2015; Wilhelm, 2014).

Data and Methods
Primary data sources from 14 teachers at Rivers Elementary School include pre- and post-PL versions of: (1) mathematics and ELA vision excerpts from teachers’ interviews (n=56 excerpts) and (2) observations of their classroom discussions in mathematics and ELA (n=56 videos).
Analysis occurred in four phases: (1) thematic content analysis of visions, (2) observation coding, (3) grouping teachers by elaboration of vision, and (4) examining practice changes within teacher groups. Interviews were coded for the presence of six dimensions of classroom discussion, as shown in Table 2. Observations were coded from combined elements of the EQUIP framework (Reinholz & Shah, 2018) and the LIDO instrument (LaRusso et al., 2023), as shown in Table 3. We use mixed methods, including chi-squared statistical tests, epistemic network analysis (Phillips et al., 2021; Shaffer et al., 2016), and qualitative cases of teachers to compare group differences and illustrate change over time in both vision and practice.

Results
Due to space constraints, we report only on chi-square test comparisons before PL, where we grouped teachers based on visions that were more or less aligned with dialogic discussion (i.e., more vs. fewer dimensions in their vision excerpts) and explored variation in their observed practice. Teachers with visions more aligned with dialogic discussion had several statistically significant differences in their observed practice, including: higher instances of the teacher soliciting student to student talk (6.9% vs. 4.0%), and higher instances of students contributing in ways that directly responded to other students within the discussion (6.4% vs. 2.6%).

Significance
This fine-grained analysis of the relationship between teachers' visions and practice over time and across content areas can support the tailoring of future PL that seeks to support teachers to deepen both their vision and enacted practice of dialogic discussion.

Authors

• Amy Guillotte, University of Pennsylvania

• Sam Prough, University of Delaware

• Rebecca Memmolo, University of Delaware

• Anne Garrison Wilhelm, Southern Methodist University

• Sarah Schneider Kavanagh, University of Pennsylvania

• Robyn K. Pinilla, University of Texas - El Paso

• Lynsey K. Gibbons, University of Delaware