More Like this

1. From terrified to comfortable: a fourth-grade teacher’s journey in teaching coding

   https://doi.org/10.51272/pmena.42.2020-323  

   Menke, Jenna; Miller, Claire (December 2020, Proceedings of the 42nd Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education)

   Sacristán, A.I.; Cortés-Zavala, J.C.; Ruiz-Arias, P.M. (Ed.)

   Collective Argumentation Learning and Coding (CALC) is a project focused on providing teachers with strategies to engage students in collective argumentation in mathematics, science, and coding. Collective argumentation can be characterized by any instance where multiple people (teachers and students) work together to establish a claim and provide evidence to support it (Conner et al., 2014b). Collective argumentation is an effective approach for promoting critical and higher order thinking and supporting students’ ability to articulate and justify claims. The goal of the CALC project is to help elementary school teachers extend the use of collective argumentation from teaching mathematics and science to teaching coding. Doing so increases the probability that teachers will integrate coding in regular classroom instruction, making it accessible to all students. This project highlighted Gloria (pseudonym), a fourth-grade teacher from Cohort 1 because of the extent to which she went from fear of coding to fluent implementation. Initially, Gloria was comfortable engaging her students in argumentation, explaining they already used it in mathematics with Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI). However, she was “terrified” about learning to code because she didn’t view herself as proficient with technology. She was willing to overcome her fear of coding because she saw the value in providing her students with coding experiences that would help them develop the necessary skills for our increasingly technological society. In the course of three months, Gloria’s instruction progressed from using simple coding activities to more sophisticated coding platforms. This progression in her coding instruction paralleled the change in her personal feelings about coding as she moved from “terrified” to “comfortable with it”. 

   more » « less
2. “I Loved Seeing How Their Brains Worked!”—Examining the Role of Epistemic Empathy in Responsive Teaching

   https://doi.org/10.1177/00224871231187313  

   Jaber, Lama_Z; Davidson, Shannon_G; Metcalf, Allison (July 2023, Journal of Teacher Education)

   Studies in science and mathematics education have shown that teachers’ responsiveness to students’ ideas, feelings, and experiences is critical for promoting epistemic agency, disciplinary engagement, and equity. Such responsiveness is particularly important for students whose cultures, backgrounds, and funds of knowledge have been traditionally marginalized in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) classrooms. Yet, what allows teachers to enact responsive teaching is less clear. We argue that epistemic empathy—the capacity for tuning into and appreciating learners’ intellectual and emotional experiences in constructing, communicating, and critiquing knowledge—is an essential driver of teacher responsiveness. In this work, we examine how epistemic empathy can serve to support teachers’ attention and responsiveness to students’ sensemaking experiences in the classroom and discuss emergent tensions that arise in this work. We end with implications for research and for teacher education to cultivate epistemic empathy as a resource for responsive teaching and a target for teacher learning. 

   more » « less
3. FROM UNIVERSITY TO SCHOOL: EXPLORING BEGINNING TEACHERS INTEGRATING REASONING AND PROVING

   Weingarden, M; Buchbinder, O (July 2023, Proceedings of the 46th Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education)

   Ayalon, M; Koichu, B; Leikin, R; Rubel, L; Tabach, M (Ed.)

   We follow a beginning mathematics teacher, Olive, from the university-based course Mathematical Reasoning and Proving for Secondary Teachers through the supervised internship where Olive taught in her cooperating teacher’s classroom. By drawing upon Activity Theory, we compare her teaching within the two teaching settings, and we examine the opportunities for reasoning and proving she provided to her students in each teaching setting. As a prospective teacher, Olive provided her students opportunities for reasoning and proving. During the internship, these opportunities initially diminished due to institutional and contextual constraints. However, Olive gradually carved out unique paths to engage students with reasoning and proving as her teaching independence increased. 

   more » « less
4. Transformations in Elementary Teachers' Pedagogical Reasoning: Studying Teacher Learning in an Online Graduate Program in Engineering Education

   Watkins, Jessica; Portsmore, Merredith; Swanson, Rebecca (January 2019, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   This research paper describes a study of elementary teacher learning in an online graduate program in engineering education for in-service teachers. While the existing research on teachers in engineering focuses on their disciplinary understandings and beliefs (Hsu, Cardella, & Purzer, 2011; Martin, et al., 2015; Nadelson, et al., 2015; Van Haneghan, et al., 2015), there is increasing attention to teachers' pedagogy in engineering (Capobianco, Delisi, & Radloff, 2018). In our work, we study teachers' pedagogical sense-making and reflection, which, we argue, is critical for teaching engineering design. This study takes place in [blinded] program, in which teachers take four graduate courses over fifteen months. The program was designed to help teachers not only learn engineering content, but also shift their thinking and practice to be more responsive to their students. Two courses focus on pedagogy, including what it means to learn engineering and instructional approaches to support this learning. These courses consist of four main elements, in which teachers: 1) Read data-rich engineering education articles to reflect on learning engineering; 2) Participate in online video clubs, looking at classroom videos of students’ engineering and commenting on what they notice; 3) Conduct interviews with learners about the mechanism of a pull-back car; and 4) Plan and teach engineering lessons, collecting and analyzing video from their classrooms. In the context of this program, we ask: what stances do teachers take toward learning and teaching engineering design? What shifts do we observe in their stances? We interviewed teachers at the start of the program and after each course. In addition to reflecting on their learning and teaching, teachers watched videos of students’ engineering and discussed what they saw as relevant for teaching engineering. We informally compared summaries from previous interviews to get a sense of changes in how participants talked about engineering, how they approached teaching engineering, and what they noticed in classroom videos. Through this process, we identified one teacher to focus on for this paper: Alma is a veteran 3rd-5th grade science teacher in a rural, racially-diverse public school in the southeastern region of the US. We then developed content logs of Alma's interviews and identified emergent themes. To refine these themes, we looked for confirming and disconfirming evidence in the interviews and in her coursework in the program. We coded each interview for these themes and developed analytic memos, highlighting where we saw variability and stability in her stances and comparing across interviews to describe shifts in Alma's reasoning. It was at this stage that we narrowed our focus to her stances toward the engineering design process (EDP). In this paper, we describe and illustrate shifts we observed in Alma's reasoning, arguing that she exhibited dramatic shifts in her stances toward teaching and learning the EDP. At the start of the program, she was stable in treating the EDP as a series of linear steps that students and engineers progress through. After engaging and reflecting on her own engineering in the first course, she started to express a more fluid stance when talking more abstractly about the EDP but continued to take it up as a linear process in her classroom teaching. By the end of the program, Alma exhibited a growing stability across contexts in her stance toward the EDP as a fluid set of overlapping practices that students and engineers could engage in. 

   more » « less
5. Listening being to recognize and relieve harm in mathematics teaching

   Hoover, M; Phillips, C (January 2024, HAL Id: hal-04398375)

   Mathematics teaching routinely traumatizes students. Why, and what changes can we make so this is not so? Lipari (2009) argues that the ethical call of conscience is not a speaking, but a listening. We draw on her conceptions of listening otherwise and listening being to see and intervene in dynamics of potential harm in mathematics teaching. We analyse six cases for three features: attention to difference, prioritizing of compassion, and openness to self-transcendence. Our analysis reveals that teaching in these short episodes is uniformly listening oriented or speaking oriented, with speaking- oriented teaching common even when teaching engages students actively in discussion. Further, our analysis suggests mechanisms for routinely disrupting patterns of harm in mathematics teaching. 

   more » « less