This research article contributes to the growing literature highlighting the potential for innovation in mathematics education through design cycles that involve creative risk-taking and failure-based learning. Specifically, we explore how “failed” cycles of StoryCircles—a practice-based professional development approach that centers on teacher collaboration—have been productive in fostering innovations within the program. Our focus is on the challenges that arose in our efforts to enable feedback mechanisms within the StoryCircles system that support teachers’ interrogation of their own instructional practice, as they collaboratively develop lessons and expand their collective knowledge base for teaching mathematics. Through examples of three challenges, we illustrate how various lesson artifacts, including those constructed by teachers in anticipation of implementation and those extracted from actual implementations, failed to serve as the sole source of feedback for supporting teachers’ growth.
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Practice-based Teacher Development in Its Mathematical Context: Lessons and Their Representation in Approximations of Practice
Addressing the need for practice-based teacher education to attend to context, we describe anticipations of a lesson as a case of approximations of practice that may anchor practice to its disciplinary context. After providing a general framework for how to think about anchoring practice in context we consider the StoryCircles process as an approximation of practice and illustrate the variability in anticipations of a lesson that can be generated by different StoryCircles. We use this variability to propose a conceptualization of lesson which is of particular value to practice-based teacher education.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2201087
- PAR ID:
- 10618241
- Publisher / Repository:
- The Korean Society of Educational Studies in Mathematics
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
- Volume:
- 34
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 2288-7733
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 753 to 791
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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