Developing High-Leverage Practices Through Cycles of Enactment and Investigation

• In Event: Understanding the Development of High-Leverage Mathematical Teaching Practices

Abstract

This design, development, and research project aims to prepare beginning teachers to do the work of teaching in ways that result in academic learning for all students. We work with pre-service elementary teachers to develop competence in a small set of high-leverage practices including the following: (1) preparing for instruction toward a mathematical goal, (2) attending to pace and student motivation, (3) assessing students’ understanding, (4) establishing and maintaining expectations, (5) eliciting and responding to student reasoning, (6) representing math concepts and student strategies/reasoning, and (7) orienting students to each others’ ideas.

To develop pre-service teachers' (PSTs) competence in these practices, we engage them daily in multi-staged Cycles of Enactment and Investigation (Cycle). Each Cycle begins with a class of PSTs observing and analyzing an enactment of an instructional activity (IA) in a classroom context, either live or on video. The IA serves as a container for work on high-leverage practices in relation to principles of ambitious teaching and mathematical content. The next stages involve PSTs in preparing to teach the IA and then rehearsing it publicly in front of their peers with feedback from the teacher educator. The PSTs then enact the IA with students in elementary school classrooms, video-recording their work. Continuing the Cycle, the teacher educator guides a collective analysis using records of the enactments to examine how the principles, practices, and mathematical content designed into the activity played out in a particular context.

In order to investigate the opportunities to learn high leverage practices available to novices in each stage of the Cycle, we have collected a range of data, including extensive video records at each stage, field notes, and analytic teaching reflections. For our first phase of analysis, we have chosen to focus on the stage of “coached rehearsals.” Using the video analysis tool, Studiocode, we segmented our video records of rehearsals into instances in which a coach deliberately intervened. Each instance was coded for principles, practices, and mathematics in the content of the exchange, and the roles the teacher educator and the novices play in it. Our preliminary analyses suggest that the teacher educator intervenes in several capacities – to give directive feedback, to pose problems of practice, to facilitate collective problem solving, and to model aspects of ambitious teaching. By strategically alternating among these roles, the teacher educator creates opportunities for interns to experiment with and refine their use of high-leverage practices and to develop professional judgment in relation to guiding instructional principles and mathematical goals. For instance, we have found that when the teacher educator “acts the student,” she is able to pose problems of practice to which the beginning teacher must respond interactively as she addresses a range of issues related to managing student engagement, attending to student errors, and eliciting and responding to student thinking more generally. Confronted with such ‘simulated’ problems of practice, the beginning teacher must make judgments about how to respond based on her current knowledge of her students, content, and principles of ambitious teaching.

Authors

• Hala N. Ghousseini, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Magdalene Lampert, Boston Plan for Excellence

• Heather Lauren Beasley, University of Michigan