EQUIP-ing Teachers to Address Issues of Classroom Equity

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

Abstract

Equity is a critical concern in mathematics education and STEM more broadly. Recent research illuminates the subtle ways in which inequities emerge in classroom interactions, particularly in relation to race, gender, class, and other social markers. However, if teachers are unable to notice such inequities, they cannot address them. In this session we describe EQUIP (Equity QUantified In Participation), a tool for capturing equitable participation in classroom discourse. As a tool, EQUIP provides quantitative “equity analytics,” which allow a user to track differences in participation along the lines of race, gender, or any other demographic variable. In this way, EQUIP provides an elaboration of the Access dimension of TRU Math, which provides a 3-point holistic scale of equity in participation.

Theoretically, we draw from teacher noticing and sociopolitical perspectives. Thus, we view learning as a process of participating in increasingly richer ways in communities of practice. Considering a STEM classroom as such a community, participation in disciplinary discourse is a key practice of doing mathematics or science. As such, EQUIP focuses on the amount and nature of students’ talk-based participation and the specific moves a teacher makes to open opportunities for student participation. These particular aspects of classroom discourse are then cross-tabulated with classroom demographics, to provide analytics about how participation is distributed across social markers.

With respect to noticing, these analytics provide teachers with a lens to attend to and interpret inequities in classroom participation that emerge for numerous reasons, such as: implicit bias, racial narratives, and the historical marginalization of certain student groups. In future work, these analytics could provide the basis for a robust program of professional development centered around issues of equity, to help teachers address the inequities they learn to notice. For example, if the analytics show that girls or Black students are receiving disproportionately fewer high-level questions than their classmates, then teachers can focus their attention on addressing that particular aspect of inequity. In that sense, EQUIP becomes a tool that generates targeted, actionable data for teachers.

In this session we provide details of the EQUIP approach to equity analytics, drawing on our analyses of whole-class discussions in multiple K-12 STEM classrooms. These analyses highlight that even very equitable classrooms may harbor subtle inequities. We illustrate the ways in which EQUIP deepens the Access dimension TRU Math, because EQUIP provides a connection between who is participating and how they participate. In this way, we see EQUIP as complementary to other approaches, both holistic observation tools like TRU Math and rich qualitative analyses. Finally, we introduce the EQUIP web application, which is a freely available tool for generating equity analytics in real time that has great potential for improving research and professional development.

Authors

• Daniel Reinholz, San Diego State University

• Niral Shah, Michigan State University