Supporting Teachers to Learn the Practice of Ambitious Mathematics Teaching

1. Supporting Teachers to Learn the Practice of Ambitious Mathematics Teaching Summer Learning Institute Teacher Education Workshop July 17, 2011

2. Megan Franke & Angela Chan, UCLA Hala Ghousseini, University of Wisconsin Elham Kazemi, University of Washington Magdalene Lampert & Heather Beasley, University of Michigan

3. What do we mean byambitious mathematics teaching? Mathematics teaching which aims to produce • competent performance • in complex domains • for all students

4. Ambitious Mathematics Teaching What do we mean byambitious mathematics teaching? Teaching which aims to produce • Competent performance • Acquire • Understand • And be able to use knowledge • In complex domains • Communication • Providing evidence for conclusions • Connected structures • For all students • Attention to differences in what students bring • Teaching is continuously calibrated to learning

5. The work of Teaching is in structuring relationships Literacy and Mathematics 2 3 1 Teacher K-12 students 4 The social and institutional context of schools and classrooms

6. What do we mean bythe PRACTICE of ambitious mathematics teaching? Practice 1 • doing, thoughtful doing • not the opposite of theory but the use of theory in action in a particular context Practice 2 • “high leverage” practices • things that teachers do regularly to support learning Practice 3 • deliberate repeating of an action with feedback until you get good at it • integration of routines with good judgment about when and how to use them Practice 4 • collective activity expresses shared commitments • using common tools and common language • commitment to common principles

7. Why might it be important to support teachers on all of these fronts at once? TURN AND TALK Share with whole group Practice 1 • doing, thoughtful doing • not the opposite of theory but the use of theory in action in a particular context Practice 2 • “high leverage” practices • things that teachers do regularly to support learning Practice 3 • deliberate repeating of an action with feedback until you get good at it • integration of routines with good judgment about when and how to use them Practice 4 • collective activity expresses shared commitments • using common tools and common language • commitment to common principles

8. The work of Teacher Education is in structuring relationships The practice of teaching 2 3 5 1 Teacher educators Novice teachers 4 The social and institutional context for learning teaching

9. How can we design teacher education to structure the relationships among teacher educators, novice teachers, and teaching practice so that novice teachers are likely to develop competence and identities as ambitious teachers?

11. Hypothesis #1: • Instructional activities can be crafted to • enable children to learn important mathematics • enable novices to learn • Routine practices • Enactment of principles • Use of knowledge in action • enable teacher educators to learn “responsive” coaching

12. Instructional Activities are designed to be “containers” for knowledge, principles and practices underlying ambitious teaching PRACTICES KNOWLEDGE PRINCIPLES

13. Practices the IAs enable coach to work on • Launching/beginning an activity • Managing space • Managing time/pacing • Using body and voice • Managing student engagement • Eliciting and responding to student contributions • Orienting students to one another • Attending to student thinking • Attending to student errors • Assessing student understanding • Closing an activity

14. Principles the IAs enable the coach to work on • Children are sensemakers. • Teachers must design instruction for all children to do rigorous academic work in school and to have equitable access to learning. • Ambitious instruction requires clear instructional goals. • Teachers must know their students as individuals and as learners. • Teachers must be responsive to the requirements of the school environment.

15. The coach is also engaging teachers in learning mathematics for teaching • Mathematical processes, e.g. • Making sense of problems • Reasoning quantitatively • Constructing viable arguments • Looking for and expressing regularity • Etc. • Mathematical content, e.g. • Operations on whole numbers, fractions • Understanding and using place value • Understanding, comparing, and representing fractions • Representing and solving problems with operations • Etc.

16. Cycles of Enactment and Investigation Common Instructional Activities Coaching through Rehearsals Where does coaching fit in relation to enactment?

17. Hypothesis #2 • Instructional activities can be used most effectively and efficiently to support teachers in cycles of observations and enactment in designed (“applied”) settings • Professional education is immediately responsive to actual problems of practice • Formative assessment can occur throughout the cycle and in repeated cycles and development can be responsive to what teachers need to learn

18. NEXT CYCLE CYCLES of ENACTMENT and INVESTIGATION SAME ACTIVITY ACROSS MULTIPLE TEACHERS AND SETTINGS Prepare to teach an Instructional Activity Collective analysis of teaching & learning Coaching through Rehearsals Observing an Instructional Activity Collective analysis of math and teaching Enact the Activity and record teaching & learning

19. Where/How/When can all of this happen?

20. Hypothesis #3 • We need to design (new) settings for Teacher Education to happen • Places where the cycle can happen • Places where there are more capable and articulate colleagues to identify with • Time for teachers to watch each other • Technology for collecting records of practice and making them available • ?