Dawn Teuscher recently published an article titled “Conceptualizing Curricular Reasoning: A Framework for Examining Mathematics Teachers’ Curricular Decisions” in the Journal Investigations in Mathematics Learning. Dawn has answered a few questions about this article below:
Who were your co-authors on this article?
Shannon Dingman from the University of Arkansas, Travis Olson from University of Nevada Las Vegas, and Lisa Kasmer from Grand Valley State University.
Who would you say is the target audience for this article?
Teacher educators.
What is the big problem you hoped to address with this article?
Teachers’ reason differently when making decisions as they plan and implement mathematics lessons in their classroom. We propose that teachers need to be thinking about the mathematics curriculum, the students, the mathematics and their own understanding of the concepts to create an implement a productive lesson.
What are some of the key ideas in the article?
We extend the instructional triangle to the Instructional Pyramid to demonstrate that teachers’ reasoning with curriculum is different than reasoning with the mathematics. We explain how teachers’ reasoning connects different elements of the Instruction Pyramid (students, teacher, curriculum, and mathematics). We also suggest that as teachers reason on more edges of the Instructional Pyramid that this provides different opportunities for students to understand and make sense of the mathematics.
What are some of the main ideas you hope your audience will take from this article?
We hope that teacher educators will begin to use the Instructional Pyramid in their classes with pre-service teachers/inservice teachers to help them identify which elements (students, teacher, mathematics, and curriculum) they may not be reasoning about as they make mathematical decisions. We also hope that teacher educators can use the Instructional Pyramid to identify different reasoning aspects that pre-service/inservice teachers may not be as familiar with as a way to improve their teaching practice.
Abstract:
Mathematics teachers make a number of decisions that shape their lessons, which therein impact their students’ opportunity to learn mathematics. Past research has often focused on teachers, students and the mathematical content as key classroom elements that drive teachers’ decisions. In this article, we propose that a fourth element – the curriculum – along with teachers’ curricular reasoning also hold considerable influence on teachers’ decisions. Using data collected from middle grades teachers’ curricular decisions, we share the Instructional Pyramid model for Curricular Reasoning to organize the interactions among these four key classroom elements and to delineate aspects of curricular reasoning. This model serves as a multi-dimensional framework to make sense of teachers’ curricular decisions.