Dissertation Defense Announcement Ph.D. in Education Program: Sarah Cartmell “Learning to Elicit Student Reasoning: A Microgenetic Case Study”
Facilitating collaborative, inquiry-based pedagogies in mathematics classrooms can be complex in practice and challenging for teachers to learn. This qualitative study examines the learning experiences of a middle-school mathematics educator from an urban school district who participated in a three-year professional development program designed to elicit student reasoning early in his teaching career. A follow-up interview conducted eighteen years later traces the teacher’s career trajectory and the durability of student-centered, collaborative instructional practices.
Primary data for this qualitative study consist of video recordings from the Informal Mathematics Learning (IML) program, an NSF funded project. Video data captures task sessions, collaborative discussions, and pre- and post-interviews. The IML program functioned as both as a research site focused on student reasoning and as professional development for eight district teachers (“teacher interns”) who partnered with researchers to elicit and observe student reasoning in an informal learning environment. Learning through a type of Lesson Study, teacher interns observed researchers facilitating task sessions with a first cohort of students, participated in post-facilitation discussions and then planned, facilitated, and reflected on task sessions with a second cohort of students. An additional follow up interview conducted eighteen years after the program’s completion enabled analysis of the program’s longitudinal impact for one teacher intern. Microgenetic methods were used to closely analyze the teacher intern’s learning throughout participation in the IML program.
Findings indicate the lasting transfer of instructional conditions such as careful selection of tasks and eliciting student reasoning in small and large group settings to classroom practice in a lasting manner. These results suggest that the IML professional development experience that immerses teachers in observing, facilitating, and reflecting on student-driven mathematical discourse can foster durable instructional dispositions and practices related to eliciting student reasoning.