Teaching for Robust Understanding Framework and Lesson Study (TRU-LS) Beyond Four Walls: Teacher Noticing of How Socially Constructed Mathematics Narratives Leak Into Classrooms

• In Event: 42.057 - Teacher Noticing for Equity: A TRU Perspective

Abstract

In the drive from knowledge to action and progress toward equal educational opportunity, Oakland Unified School District introduced a professional learning (PL) strategy that merges TRU framework and lesson study (TRU-LS). This union converges multiple components that prior research has identified as imperative for improving instruction (for a list see SERP, 2015). Thus, it provides a structure for teacher-driven investigations of student learning that fosters teacher noticing, while developing a common language that includes an equity component to talk about such investigations and supplies tools for planning, reflection, and refinement.

As a pilot, the purpose of the current study was to explore the ways in which TRU might function in a lesson study cycle and the strengths and limitations of the TRU-LS link.

This paper focuses on a TRU-LS cycle pilot initiated by a team of three high school teachers. Prior to the pilot, the teachers participated in department-wide TRU PL workshops. The lesson study cycle consisted of five planning meetings and a day of research lessons. The day of research lessons followed an innovative format that included a pre-lesson discussion, two research lessons followed by a post-lesson debrief which preceded a third research lesson and final debrief. Each teacher taught a research lesson to a class of students that was not their own. Data sources were observations, field notes, and audio recordings of the planning meetings, discussions and debriefs.

Preliminary analyses indicate that TRU informed teachers’ research questions and guided the teachers’ investigation. The teachers focused their research questions around access; namely, the ways students contribute to peer discussions and what/who is valued. These, then, guided much of the teachers’ observations. For example, a common observation was that “one student was driving stuff.” Initially, discussions about students’ contributions primarily focused on status and how status was related to “skill level,” but, later, the conversation shifted to the teachers’ noticing that sociopolitical narratives associated with being in a “repeater” class might be contributing to the “de-valuing” (ignoring, interrupting, teasing) they observed. So much so that one teacher wondered if spending only 3 months on content and the remaining time counteracting the “repeater” narrative would have “put them in the same place.” This is in stark contrast to teachers at another (non-TRU) site who insisted that the research lesson would not work in the “repeater” class.

TRU-LS helped teachers notice in some vital ways, however, there were some noticeable “blank spots” (Wagner, 2010, p. 173). For example, the teachers asserted that kids don’t know how to play dominoes though Black students are the largest racial group at the school and dominoes are a Black cultural product (for a thorough review see Nasir, 2002). This may have kept them from noticing that in every instance when a teacher said they were surprised that a certain student contributed because they never contribute, that student was Black.

Future analyses will examine the persistence and nature of teacher noticing of sociopolitical narratives as well as ways TRU-LS can be leveraged to fill-in “blank spots.”

Authors

• Angela Dosalmas, Mills College

• Kevin Lai, Mills College

• Catherine C. Lewis, Mills College