Teacher Learning Laboratory 2021 Round Up
My lab had another great year, despite the chaos of the pandemic. We had a wide-range of publications from several projects that wrapped up recently. We explored issues of teacher learning, of course, but also issues of identity and math learning, instructional coaching, and more. Below, I am including journal articles, chapters, as well as some podcast episodes.
Without further ado, here is the roundup:
Grace A, Chen Samantha A. Marshall, and Ilana S. Horn.
“‘How do I choose?’: mathematics teachers’ sensemaking about pedagogical
responsibility.” Pedagogy, Culture & Society 29, no. 3
(2021): 379-396.
Teachers’ decisions are often undergirded by their sense of pedagogical
responsibility: whom and what they feel beholden to. However, research on
teacher sensemaking has rarely examined how teachers reason about their
pedagogical responsibilities. The study analyzed an emotional conversation
among urban mathematics teachers about what they teach mathematics for, given
the many non-mathematical challenges they and their students face. The familiarity and simplicity of love and life skills narratives deployed to describe what it means to be a good teacher and to do good teaching may be comforting, but limit teachers’ engagement with other authentic forms of
pedagogical reasoning about their pedagogical responsibility in complex sociopolitical contexts. The findings reveal the importance of opportunities to explore alternate possibilities ‘for what,’ especially within structured and supportive teacher collaborative groups.
Lara Jasien & Melissa Gresalfi (2021) The role of
participatory identity in learners’ hybridization of activity across contexts, Journal
of the Learning Sciences, 30:4-5, 676-706.
Background: We explore how school-based mathematical
experiences shape out-of-school mathematical experiences, developing the idea
that learners hybridize norms and practices around authority and evaluation
across these two contexts. To situate our study, we build on constructs of participatory
identity and framing.
Methods: Drawing from a large corpus of video records
capturing children’s point-of-view, we present a case study of hybridization
with two purposively sampled 12-year-old friends—Aimee and Dia—interacting in
an out-of-school mathematics playspace. We use interaction analysis to
articulate grounded theories of hybridization.
Findings: We present a thick description of how children
hybridize their activity in out-of-school spaces and how such hybridization is
consequential for engagement. Dia’s case illustrates how traditional norms
and practices around authority and evaluation can lead to uncertainty and
dissatisfaction, while Aimee’s illustrates how playful norms and practices can
lead to exploration and pleasure in making. We argue that their school-based
mathematics experiences and identities influenced these differences.
Contribution: This report strengthens theoretical and
methodological tools for understanding how activity and identity development in
one context become relevant and shape activity in another by connecting
analytic constructs of identity, framing, and hybridizing.
Samantha A. Marshall, and Patricia M. Buenrostro. “What Makes
Mathematics Teacher Coaching Effective? A Call for a Justice-Oriented
Perspective.” Journal of Teacher Education, vol. 72, no. 5, Nov. 2021,
pp. 594–60.
Mathematics teacher coaching is a promising but largely overlooked form of
professional development (PD) for supporting mathematics teachers’ learning of
justice-oriented teaching. In this article, we critically review the literature
to illuminate what we currently know about mathematics teacher coaching and to
highlight studies’ contributions and limitations to inform future work.
Broadly, we find that four programs of research have developed, investigating:
(a) coaches’ activities and relationships, (b) the effects of coaching on
student assessment scores, (c) the effects of coaching on teachers’ practices
or behaviors, and (d) the effects of coaching on teachers’ knowledge or
beliefs. From this analysis, we argue that justice-oriented perspectives of
teaching, in tandem with sociocultural theories of teachers’ learning, could
allow for more nuanced investigations of coaching and could support design of
learning experiences for teachers that bring us closer to educational justice.
Ilana Seidel Horn and Melissa Gresalfi. “Broadening Participation in
Mathematical Inquiry: A Problem of Instructional Design.” In R.G. Duncan
and C.A. Chinn (Eds.) International Handbook of Inquiry and Learning.
Routledge.
Cultural myths about mathematics as a set of known facts pose unique
obstacles for inquiry instruction. What is there to discover if everything is
already known? At the same time, decades of mathematics education research
shows the potential for inquiry instruction to broaden participation in the
discipline. Taking a classroom ecology perspective, this chapter uncovers
common obstacles to inquiry in school mathematics and identifies three leverage
points for redesigning instruction toward this goal. These include: teachers’
knowledge for inquiry mathematics, curricular connections to other contexts,
and classroom norms and practices. The chapter proposes that design thinking
around these leverage points holds promise for wider-spread implementation of
inquiry instruction in mathematics classrooms.
Emma Gargroetzi, Ilana Seidel Horn, Rosa Chavez and Sunghwan Byun.
“Institution-Identities in the Neoliberal Era:
Challenging Differential Opportunities for Mathematics Learning.” In J.
Langer-Osuna and N. Shah (Eds.) Making Visible the Invisible:
The Promise and Challenges of Identity Research in Mathematics National
Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Schools exert powerful forces on people’s lives. As society’s formal setting
for learning, schools-or, more precisely, the people in authority there-certify
the learning of the next generation. Contradictions between learning and the
bureaucratized systems of schooling are particularly keen in mathematics
classrooms, where students are constantly subjected to tools that measure,
rank, sort, and label them and their learning. The use of technical instruments
as the tools of measurement gives results a veneer of scientific truth such
that shifting life trajectories get both rationalized and made invisible. We
refer to the mathematical identities that come from such processes as
institution-identities (Gee, 2000), exploring how policy language makes
available and naturalizes certain positions for students within schools. In
other words, we examine how policy language and practices shape and constrain
possibilities for young people’s mathematical identities in school-based
interactions. All four authors of this chapter taught in U.S. schools. As such,
we all have been actors in processes that took full, complex human beings and
sorted, labeled, and set them on different paths. In doing so, we
co-constructed students’ mathematical institution-identities, giving credence
to (or shedding doubt on) stories about their capabilities and future
possibilities. In this chapter, we use thickly described examples from four
research projects to examine and illuminate how policy language and practices
shape and constrain possibilities for young people’s mathematical identities in
school-based interactions. On the basis of this analysis, we develop a theory
of how policies and neoliberal logics operate together to provide
institution-identities that become consequential in children’s mathematical
identities and learning. We argue that mathematics educators concerned with
issues of access, equity, and inclusion should attend to institution-identities
rooted in neoliberal policies that naturalize processes contributing to social
stratification. We furthermore demonstrate that policy and its enactment can
serve as a site for research into the discursive nature of mathematical
identities.
Rebuilding after 2020-2021 on the Human Restoration
Project Podcast
In this conversation, we discuss how teachers can wrap up the 2020-2021
school year through reflection. How can we build a better system after seeing
the inequities, problems, and challenges that this school year has highlighted?
And, how do we build a classroom in spite of a system that often demotivates
and disenfranchises educators?
“Motivated” Summer Readaloud Series on the Heinemann Podcast
Motivated is a guidebook for teachers unsatisfied with questions
met by silence. By examining what works in other classrooms and following the
example of been-there teachers, you’ll start changing slumped shoulders and
blank stares into energetic, engaged learners.
In this preview, Ilana digs into some common teaching strategies and
explores the “how” and “why” behind them.
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Our lab has a lot more in store for you –– more articles coming out in Educational
Researcher, Journal of Research in Mathematics Education, and Review
of Educational Research, just to name a few. We are probably most excited
about the monograph we have coming out this spring, Teacher Learning about Ambitious and Equitable Mathematics Instruction: A Sociocultural Approach. Authored by me and
Brette Garner, my whole Project SIGMa team contributed to individual chapters. We
are really looking forward to conversations about these ideas in the coming
months and beyond.