Detailing Practice
Clearly detailing practice relates closely to the notion of
high-leverage practices. We want teacher education students to be able
to “do” the teaching of mathematics in ways that become generative. We
believe that to do this, understanding the details of the practice is
critical. It is not about using particular materials or putting
students in groups; it is how we accomplish this as teachers that
matters. The details of how to teach often remain, as Kathy Morris puts
it, an “invisible” aspect of teaching. So as teacher educators, one of
our most powerful pedagogical moves is to push our students to
explicitly articulate the details of classroom practice.
Detailing practice involves understanding the practice in ways that
allow one to be able to articulate the parameters of the practice,
connect it to other practices, see it in relation to different students
and how they may participate in the practice and so on. Details matter.
Describing practices in our research and our work in our methods
courses allows for unpacking, supports conversations about meaning, and
helps us be explicit about agreement and disagreement.
Choosing a Pedagogical Focus
Janine Remillard allows students to choose their own pedagogical
focus, “Each prospective teacher selected a pedagogical focus from a
list provided to emphasize in their planning and teaching. The purpose
of asking them to identify and work on a single pedagogical focus is to
encourage them to direct their efforts on some aspect of their
developing pedagogies, rather than trying to do everything at once.
Having a single pedagogical focus also made it more likely that
students would focus their attention on the role the four dimensions of
teaching played in shaping their pedagogy.” See what her students
learned.
Problem Posing
Megan Franke pushes her students to detail the high-leverage
practice problem posing. She uses the Quest site developed by Mary
Hurley and facilitates discussions about what students notice about
Hurley’s problem posing.
Modeling
The Mathematics Planning Group explains that modeling computational
algorithms with manipulatives is a central component of their methods
course. They utilize records of practice to unpack these practices and
identify and articulate key features of this work. Building in
structured peer and instructor feedback allows for discussion of the
details of modeling with manipulatives.
Participation Structures
Kathy Morris focuses on detailing different participation structures
that teachers can employ in their classrooms. She engages her teacher
education students in these different structures, detailing the
affordances and constraints of participation that each structure
provides.
In each of the sites, the teacher educator is supporting the teacher
education students to detail practice. And in many cases we work
towards it in similar ways. You will see that we all develop tools that
we can use repeatedly to focus discussion at a finer and finer grain of
detail (you can see this with the mathematics task framework on the
Franke site or the…). You can see it in the repeated passes looking at
the same episode of classroom video (give an example, as when Remillard
asks the students to…). You can see it in the questions that we ask to
get students to attend to the details of the mathematics, the student
thinking or the teaching routine (you can see this in the sets of
questions Marks asks as he engages his students around understanding
tasks and classroom culture. And you can see the push for details in
the debriefing conversations we have as students discuss what they
“see” in the sites. (Note: all of these examples of the teacher
educator work make it explicit that it is not the web based materials
alone that are important - it is how we are using them). These
approaches all push teacher education students to have to make explicit
their thinking, to continue to be more and more specific and to see how
their ideas fit in relation to some broader sets of ideas.
In some cases we see this same detailing as the teacher education
students move to trying out some of the practices themselves in their
own teaching (Remillard and Franke).
We see this work as helping students to understand the practices, in
ways they are developing their routines around the practice and making
them explicit. You will see that it then becomes critical to spend a
significant amount of time with a single practice, rather than moving
quickly from practice to practice.
Perspectives