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1. Lessons from a co-design team on supporting student motivation in middle school science classrooms

   https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2021.1932155  

   Marchand, Gwen C.; Schmidt, Jennifer A.; Linnenbrink-Garcia, Lisa; Harris, Christopher J.; McKinney, David; Liu, Pei Pei (January 2021, Theory Into Practice)

   null (Ed.)

   Decades of motivation research have yielded a set of Motivation Design Principles (MDPs) that can be leveraged to support the development of student motivation and engagement in the classroom. This article addresses the translation of these guiding principles to teacher professional learning and subsequently, classroom practice. Drawing from published literature, as well as the experiences of a co-design team of motivation and science education researchers and middle school science teachers, we address the landscape of decision points for designing and implementing professional learning focused on supporting middle school students’ motivation in science. We identify 3 key decision points: (1) the extent to which professional learning should focus on general principles or specific practices; (2) the appropriate level(s) for translation of the MDPs into practice; and (3) the creation of opportunities for teacher reflection and self-assessment of their practice on student motivation and engagement. 

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2. Teacher learning to teach mathematics via reasoning and proving: a discursive analysis of lesson plans modifications

   https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2023.1154531  

   Weingarden, Merav; Buchbinder, Orly (August 2023, Frontiers in Education)

   Christiansen, I (Ed.)

   Despite the importance of reasoning and proving in mathematics and mathematics education, little is known about how future teachers become proficient in integrating reasoning and proving in their teaching practices. In this article, we characterize this aspect of prospective secondary mathematics teachers’ (PSTs’) professional learning by drawing upon the commognitive theory. We offer a triple-layer conceptualization of (student)learning,teaching, andlearning to teachmathematics via reasoning and proving by focusing on the discourses students participate in (learning), the opportunities for reasoning and proving afforded to them (teaching), and how PSTs design and enrich such opportunities (learning to teach). We explore PSTs’ pedagogical discourse anchored in the lesson plans they designed, enacted, and modified as part of their participation in a university-based course:Mathematical Reasoning and Proving for Secondary Teachers. We identified four types of discursive modifications: structural, mathematical, reasoning-based, and logic-based. We describe how the potential opportunities for reasoning and proving afforded to students by these lesson plans changed as a result of these modifications. Based on our triple-layered conceptualization we illustrate how the lesson modifications and the resulting alterations to student learning opportunities can be used to characterize PSTs’ professional learning. We discuss the affordances of theorizing teacher practices with the same theoretical lens (grounded in commognition) to inquire student learning and teacher learning, and how lesson plans, as a proxy of teaching practices, can be used as a methodological tool to better understand PSTs’ professional learning. 

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3. “Bringing new things to light”: Examining a process of insight-driven teacher learning.

   Rubin, E. B; van Es, E. A. (January 2022, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference of the Learning Sciences)

   Chinn, C.; Tan, E.; Chan, C.; Kali, Y. (Ed.)

   Effective teaching relies on practices of reflection and inquiry that must be cultivated throughout teachers’ careers. Professional development (PD) can support those practices by positioning participants to develop and build on insights. Using data from a PD program focused on teacher noticing for equity, we draw on practice theory to identify the process and associated practices that emerged through participation in collaborative inquiry. Analysis reveals three phases of activity, consisting of interrelated practices that drove insight-based learning: building awareness, collaborative exploration, and learning through design. Through engaging in this process, participants made unconscious aspects of teaching visible that allowed participants to deepen and expand their insights, and through design, articulated new insights and situated their learning back in the context of their teaching. These findings have implications for designing PD that prioritizes participants’ agency to cultivate practices of reflection and inquiry. 

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4. Using technology in representing practice to support preservice teachers’ quality questioning: The roles of noticing in improving practice

   Walkoe, J. and (January 2018, Journal of technology and teacher education)

   Calls for a “practice-based” approach to teacher education have become common in scholarship on teacher education, and preservice-teaching (PST) mathematics programs are increasingly heeding this call. Practice-based teacher education (PBTE) moves beyond standard approaches to teacher education in which PSTs learn about teaching in ways they are then expected to apply in practice and toward an approach that provides PSTs opportunities to gain experience in particular core practices in ways that approximate enactment in the classroom. A growing body of research suggests that teachers’ responses, including the questions they ask, can help students’ develop content knowledge and proficiency in mathematics and science practices in the classroom. However, despite evidence that PSTs can notice students’ thinking in various activities in their preparation programs, it is not clear that they are sufficiently well-prepared to propose quality responses before entering the classroom. In this paper, we describe two different approaches that we have taken to provide support for quality teacher questioning in the LessonSketch environment. From our results, we develop a hypothesis that a pedagogical approach that primes novices to notice model questioning can support a stance of focusing on the substance of students’ thinking and probing rather than guiding students’ thinking in their proposed questions. 

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5. Studio as a Catalyst for Incremental and Ambitious Teacher Learning

   https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14111160  

   Elliott, Rebekah; Roberts, Sarah A (November 2024, Education Sciences)

   This article explores how the practice-focused Studio professional learning (PL) model can provide incremental and ambitious teacher learning opportunities. We argue that when the model’s structures and practices are grounded in ambitious and equitable teaching, they catalyze incremental teacher learning. Studio, like lesson study, supports teachers in considering the entailments of lessons, focusing on the live shared enactment to strengthen teaching and learning through collaborative analysis and reflection. To build our argument, we drew from two Studio projects that had shared structures of cycles of learning and routines, as well as shared practices of using rich representations and collective interpretations of teaching. While both projects’ structures and practices take up ambitious and equitable teaching, they use different routines and attend to different features of equitable teaching. Building on a history of PL models, such as lesson study, which use similar structures and practices as powerful catalysts of teacher learning, we argue that Studio’s structures and practices can catalyze teachers’ incremental learning of ambitious and equitable teaching. We discuss the implications for future research based on this argument and for those leading PL. 

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