Dissertation Proposal Announcement Ph.D. in Education Program: Molly Girt “Informal Math Learning (IML) Teacher Study”

The proposed qualitative study traces five participating teachers from an urban school district as observers and facilitators of sessions with middle-school students in an after school/summer mathematics program over a three-year period. The NSF-funded Informal Mathematics Learning (IML) project took place with two cohorts of students from the participating school district. The IML project had a two-fold purpose: (1) to engage students (Cohort 1) in collaborative learning and build an understanding of the mathematics they were challenged to learn; (2) to provide teacher pairs with the opportunity to facilitate similar sessions with a new group of students (Cohort 2). The IML project provided participating teachers with the opportunity to explore instructional strategies alternative to direction instruction, which was pervasive within classrooms at the time of the study. Participating teachers observed researchers implement mathematical tasks designed to challenge the students in Cohort 1 to work together, build and support solutions to the problem tasks posed. The mathematical topics were fractions, counting/combinatorics, early algebra, and probability. Sessions were videotaped with multiple cameras. Data include: student solutions to problem tasks, video data of student and facilitator activity from sessions facilitated by researchers and teachers, debriefing sessions, and transcripts of video data. Video tapes of debriefing sessions will be analyzed to learn what teachers reported from their observations of Cohort 1 sessions in order to guide analysis of sessions teachers facilitated with Cohort 2. The questions that guide this study are: What teacher moves (e.g. explaining, questioning, revoicing, promoting sharing, etc.) were made in working with Cohort 2 students to facilitate lessons similar to those led by researchers with Cohort 1 students? What obstacles did the teachers identify during the debriefing sessions? A case study methodology (Creswell & Creswell, 2018) will be used to address the research questions. Video data will be analyzed using the model from Powell et al. (2003) and coded in alignment with guidelines from Creswell & Poth (2018).