Samantha Chklovskii
Research Mentor(s): Amanda Brown
Mentor Department: Educational Studies
Authors: Samantha Chklovskii, Amanda Brown, Anthony Davis, Qiuyu Chen
Session: Session 1 (9:00am – 9:50am)
Presentation Type: Poster 56
Abstract
In the classroom, teachers face a variety of constraints when implementing successful problem-based instruction. As researchers of mathematics teacher education, we aim to better understand teachers’ rationales, through StoryCircles, secondary mathematics educators from across the world meet. Members of StoryCircles collaborate to iteratively script, visualize, and argue about a storyboarded representation of a lesson. My research aims to analyze how teachers engaged in lesson-centered professional development select and justify varied student work in a storyboarded representation of a lesson. We utilized the Obligations Framework (Herbst and Chazan, 2012) to consider how teachers refer to four professional obligations of mathematics teaching in their justifications for actions. We observed that when teachers chose to draw attention to student work that was incorrect but normative (i.e., that followed norms of how that kind of work should be done) this was justified by the disciplinary obligation. We also observed that teachers, in the context of justifying student work, used the institutional obligation the least. Lastly, we observed differences in teacher reasoning emerged when student work is correct, these reasonings seem to be associated with differences in normativity, serviceability, and responsiveness. We focused on various phases of a lesson where teachers examined student work and considered their potential inclusion in a representation of a lesson. Examining transcripts from StoryCircles meetings, allowed us to find specific utterances that reflect teacher justifications for including student work in the whole classroom discussion in their representation of a lesson. Then, using a priori coding of correctness/incorrectness and normative/non-normative qualities associated with the student work we were able to analyze how teachers support their claims about whether or not to select student work through reasoning in their interactions with one another. This work is imperative to the field of mathematics education because it provides insight into how teachers reason in pedagogical practices
