(How) Does Engagement in Cyclic Simulations Impact Teacher Candidates' Eliciting of Student Thinking?

• In Event: Using Simulations to Prepare Teachers for Equitable Education

Abstract

Objectives & Perspectives
Simulations can provide early, frequent, and substantive formative assessment opportunities that are embedded in the doing of teaching. Formative assessment has been shown to impact learning significantly (Black & Wiliam, 1998) and it has been identified as a crucial component in teacher preparation (Darling-Hammond et al., 2005; AMTE, 2017). Formative assessment provides teacher candidates (TCs) with the type of feedback they needed to improve their practice (Grossman, 2010). Simulations can be strategically designed to ensure that all teachers perform the same facets of teaching practice in a uniform context. This can provide teacher educators with opportunities to provide TC-specific feedback. Yet, despite the potential, the field is just beginning to understand how engagement in teaching simulations impacts TCs’ performances. Our focuses on the teaching practice of eliciting student thinking in elementary mathematics. We explore a cycle of work with teaching simulations and examine the ways in which TCs demonstrated skill in eliciting student thinking shifted following feedback.
Methods and Data Sources
Each TC (N=37) engaged in a teaching simulation involving six parts. First, the TC analyzes student work from two students on a subtraction problem and prepare to ask questions of each student. Second, the TC has five minutes to interact with the one “student” to elicit the student’s process and understanding. To ensure consistency, the teacher educator in the role of the student is guided by a protocol with carefully articulated rules for reasoning and responding. Third, the TC is asked to interpret the student’s thinking. Fourth, the teacher educator provides feedback to the TC on their eliciting of student thinking, focusing on strengths and areas for growth. Fifth, the TC takes five minutes to revise their plan for interacting with the second student. Sixth, the TC interacts with the second student. We analyzed video records of the performances, focusing on TCs demonstrated skills for the first teaching simulation, the feedback provided, and their demonstrated skills in the second teaching simulations.
Results
We highlight three of the findings from our analysis.
1. Many of these PSTs elicited only part of the student’s process in the first simulation. In the second simulation, PSTs elicited the student’s process more completely.
2. Many of the PSTs asked no questions about the student’s understanding of key mathematical ideas in the first simulation or asked about ideas that were not core to the process the student used. In the second simulation, there was a deeper focus on the student’s understanding of core mathematical ideas.
3. In the first simulation, TCs rarely posed a new problem to the student to further explore the student’s thinking. Over half of the PSTs posed a new problem in the second simulation.
Significance
As have many TEs this past year, we shifted from a reliance on in-person clinical experiences to more robustly using simulations to support the work of teacher education. Our study illustrates the potential of the use of teaching simulation to support TCs in learning to elicit student thinking in elementary mathematics.

Authors

• Meghan M. Shaughnessy, Boston University

• Timothy A. Boerst, University of Michigan