Blake Peterson and Keith Leatham recently published an article titled “Conceptualizing Important Facets of Teacher Responses to Student Mathematical Thinking” in the International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology. Blake has answered a few questions about this article below:
Who were your co-authors on this article?
Laura Van Zoest, Shari Stockero, Annick Rougee, Ben Freeburn
Who would you say is the target audience for this article?
Researchers who study the practice of mathematics teachers.
What is the big problem you hoped to address with this article?
NCTM recommends that mathematics teachers should use student thinking as part of their class discussions but what does it look like to effectively do that. As a first step to studying how to productively use student thinking, we studied teachers initial responses to instances of student thinking.
What are some of the key ideas in the article?
When evaluating teacher responses to student thinking, we found it important to consider different facets of those responses. There are three main facts that need to be considered:
- Who is the actor being invited to engage with the student contribution? Is it the students or just the teacher?
- What action is the actor being asked to do with respect to the contribution? Are they just being asked to evaluate the correctness of an answer or are they being asked to justify the strategy? (In all we identified 14 different actions)
- How is the teacher response related to the student contribution? Is it “responsive” to the what the student saying? Is it just superficially related? Is the actor being asked to engage not only with the words in the contribution but with the ideas behind the words?
What are some of the main ideas you hope your audience will take from this article?
In many of the articles that talk about the ways teacher respond to student contributions, the various codes research use have the who, what and how intertwined and each article uses their own unique set of codes. Thus, it is difficult to compare results across different studies. By pulling the facets apart, we would hope that other researchers would use this framework focused on these facets when developing their codes so it will be easier to compare results across different studies.
Although this article describes a coding scheme that could be used by researchers, we feel that the ideas are also very useful for teachers. To productively use student thinking, we feel that teacher responses should regularly position the whole class as the actor and the action should be one that has students engage deeply with the thinking of their peers.
Abstract:
We argue that progress in the area of research on mathematics teacher responses to student thinking could be enhanced were the field to attend more explicitly to important facets of those responses, as well as to related units of analysis. We describe the Teacher Response Coding scheme (TRC) to illustrate how such attention might play out, and then apply the TRC to an excerpt of classroom mathematics discourse to demonstrate the affordances of this approach. We conclude by making several further observations about the potential versatility and power in articulating units of analysis and developing and applying tools that attend to these facets when conducting research on teacher responses.