Teaching & Learning

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: Abstract: Increasingly, instructional improvement efforts include teacher communities as part of their overall strategy, yet the relationship between teachers' talk and professional learning remains underspecified. Using a discourse perspective on learning, this paper compares opportunities to learn (OTLs) in the collaborative conversations of three mathematics teacher workgroups. We examine the differences in OTLs in 17 hours of videotaped meetings from 3 groups at different levels of instructional accomplishment in secondary mathematics. Using mixed methods, we uncovered differences in the groups' interactions and found that OTLs were not equally distributed. Instead, teacher groups whose active participants demonstrated the greatest facility with ambitious instruction also had the richest conversational OTLs. We interpret this as an accumulated advantage developmental story: because collaborative work in teaching involves problem posing and the articulation of practice, teachers' conceptions get built into the framing and discussion of pedagogical problems. Accomplished teachers are thus positioned to learn more from talking with colleagues. This analysis contributes to our understanding of how OTLs are constituted in teacher workgroups, with implications for making better use of teacher collaboration for professional learning.

Background Long-standing calls to infuse technical language in teaching—what we call the Professional Language Project—have been revived in recent years along with the core practices movement in teacher education. The Professional Language Project has been identified as a desired outcome of research and a potential benefit to teacher education. Objective Drawing on sociolinguistic studies of teachers’ sensemaking, we critique the Professional Language Project to show its limits in making the intended contribution to teaching and teacher education. Research Design This analytic essay uses a practice perspective on both language and teaching to interrogate the premises of the Professional Language Project. Specifically, we hold up its goals against empirical findings about how teachers use language to make sense of instructional decisions in their workplaces. Conclusions Empirical studies of teachers’ in situ language use point to two fallacies in the Professional Language Project. Fi...

Background/Context The Core Practice movement continues to gain momentum in teacher education research. Yet critics highlight that equitable teaching cannot be reduced to a set of “core” practices, arguing that such a reduction risks representing teaching as technical work that will be neither culturally responsive nor sustaining. Instead, they argue that preservice teachers need opportunities to develop professional reasoning that takes the specific strengths and needs of students, communities, and subject matter into account. Purpose This analysis takes up the question of how and whether pedagogies of investigation and enactment can support preservice teachers’ development of the professional reasoning that equitable teaching requires. It conceptualizes two types of professional reasoning: interpretive, in which reasoners decide how to frame instructional problems and make subsequent efforts to solve them, and prescriptive, in which reasoners solve an instructional problem as give...

Using insights from the learning sciences, the four papers in this symposium investigate the ways teachers’ collegial talk contributes to their learning about equitable instruction. One pair of papers comes from primarily observational studies, investigating how everyday storytelling and facilitation stand to instantiate or challenge teachers’ knowing about their diverse students and their instruction. The other pair of papers comes from designexperiments aiming to transform teacher knowledge. These contribute frameworks for understanding teacher learning through discourse. Together, the collection illuminates relationships between teachers’ collegial talk and projects of instructional change. Learning to Teach Equitably For education to fulfill its democratic function, teachers must effectively engage students from diverse backgrounds and support their learning and development. Such equitable teaching has been pursued by educators for decades and has yielded many well-articulated f...

Mathematics coaching is deeply complex work that requires coaches to develop and draw upon multiple forms of expertise related to mathematics, mathematics teaching, and mathematics coaching (Polly, Mraz, & Algozzine, 2013). Yet, few studies have explored how professional learning experiences for mathematics coaches might support their development of these forms of expertise (Jackson et al., 2015). Through an analysis of a representative instance in which elementary mathematics coaches participated in a professional development activity called doing the math (Loucks-Horsley et al., 2010), we aim to contribute to the growing body of research focused on how coaches’ own professional learning opportunities might be structured. Our study took place in Hamilton School District, which is a public school district located in a metropolitan area in the southeastern United States. We partnered with one district administrator and 12 elementary mathematics coaches. Eight of the coaches were ente...

How can secondary preservice teachers be supported to develop as intellectually rigorous and equitable writing instructors? This question is important, because secondary students from all backgrounds-but particularly those from traditionally underserved groups-continue to struggle with writing performance, both on standardized writing assessments and once they enter the working world

Con la publicación reciente de la citada obra de cristología acudimos a un jalón más de la ingente producción del teólogo abulense O. González de Cardedal. No obstante, este segundo volumen de cristología es pieza clave de su reflexión teológica y debe ser entendido en conjunción con un proyecto teológico unitario que, de alguna manera, ya era anunciado en el prólogo a la tercera edición de su conocida obra Jesús de Nazaret: Aproximación a la Cristología. Allí afirmaba en el año 1993: Llega la hora de la reflexión integradora, de la ordenación sistemática, de la profundización espiritual. La cristología narrativa es necesaria, pero no suficiente. No le bastan la memoria, el relato, la crítica y la propuesta a un pensamiento que necesita coherencia, totalidad, fundamento y verdad. Entramos ahora en un tiempo de obligado silencio reflexivo y creador. A la vez que una cristología sistemática, es necesaria una cristología espiritual, que asuma al hombre en su totalidad pensante y creyente… 1 .

Using insights from the learning sciences, the four papers in this symposium investigate the ways teachers' collegial talk contributes to their learning about equitable instruction. One pair of papers comes from primarily observational studies, investigating how everyday storytelling and facilitation stand to instantiate or challenge teachers' knowing about their diverse students and their instruction. The other pair of papers comes from designexperiments aiming to transform teacher knowledge. These contribute frameworks for understanding teacher learning through discourse. Together, the collection illuminates relationships between teachers' collegial talk and projects of instructional change. Learning to Teach Equitably For education to fulfill its democratic function, teachers must effectively engage students from diverse backgrounds and support their learning and development. Such equitable teaching has been pursued by educators for decades and has yielded many well-articulated frameworks and practices. Nonetheless, we see evidence of persistent educational disenfranchisement of students, especially those living in poverty or coming from nondominant cultures. Why is widespread implementation of equitable teaching so difficult? Scholars often point to longstanding traditions and institutional constraints in teaching (D. Cohen, 2011; Cuban, 1993). I n t h i s symposium, we take these conditions as a given but turn our focus onto issues of teacher learning. Frameworks from the learning sciences allow us to contextualize teacher learning within the school as a workplace, opening up new avenues for understanding the obstacles to and possibilities for making equitable teaching more commonplace in US classrooms. To develop our perspective, we offer two observations about the challenges of teachers' learning equitable instructional practices. First, we note that many well-articulated equitable teaching approaches, such as culturally responsive teaching (Gay, 2010), tapping into children's funds of knowledge (Moll & Gonzalez, 1994), or complex instruction (E. Cohen, 1994) a r e c h a r a c t e r i z e d b y t e a c h e r s ' r e s p o n s i v e n e s s t o t h e particularities of their students, making them highly situated forms of instruction. For instance, in Rosebery and colleagues' (2010) account of children learning about heat transfer, the students' key connection to ideas about insulation came from an unexpected fire drill in the dead of winter. After the children huddled to keep warm, the teachers leveraged this incident to build students' understanding. Likewise, Gutierrèz and colleagues (1999) describe a teacher effectively making a "third space" in her classroom by hybridizing home and school discourses to facilitate students' understanding of science concepts. In both examples, teachers work with what students bring to the classroom to enrich their understandings of content. For teachers to competently respond in this way, they need to develop robust pedagogical judgment. I n t h e m o m e n t-to-moment o f i n s t r u c t i o n , pedagogical judgment presses on teachers to weigh social, individual, and content concerns, trying to optimize them in their decision-making with the dual goals of inclusion and learning (Lampert, 2001). Our second observation is that widely available forms of pre-service and inservice education are highly acontextual, focusing on developing general knowledge for teaching that applies across teaching situations rather than cultivating the kind of judgment described in these prior examples. Zeichner (2010) has described typical teacher education as using a default acquire-apply pedagogy, where teachers "get" theory in courses and "apply" it in the field. In this approach, the underlying conception of professional knowledge can be likened to an appliance: instructional ideas can be plugged in and "work," regardless of the settings in which they operate. Thus, our primary mode of educating teachers is ill suited to developing the responsive practices equitable teaching demands. If we have a mismatch between pedagogies and knowledge in teacher education, what are we, as a field, to do if we want to enfranchise more students in our schools? In this symposium, we aim to make progress on this question in two ways. First, we bring together papers from four different studies examining teachers' learning in contexts that are pressing for more equitable outcomes. We will identify the contributions of these analyses to our understanding of teachers' situative reasoning. All of the papers use teachers' talk as a primary data source and a window into sensemaking, identifying different ways collegial interactions contribute to

Play in the lives of children of all ages is on the decline. This decline is even more dramatic in the middle grades, as in this context, play is almost non-existent and has been replaced with a rise in negative qualities such as anxiety, stress, and depression. This decline in play is surprising as researchers have continued to tell us of the many benefits of play for development and learning throughout the lifespan. In this paper, I examine the middle grades context and offer play as a model for meeting the needs of the middle grades learner. I then go on to give examples of how play has been incorporated in classrooms in the form of a continuum of play, showing how play might be applied on a classroom environment level, through games, in curriculum, and in the school system as a whole. By applying its characteristics to these areas, middle grades students might experience learning as joyful, happy, intrinsically motivating, and a way of experiencing flow. PLAY AS A MODEL FOR THE ...

The annual routines and seasonal ecology of herbivorous zooplankton species are relatively well known due to their tight coupling with their pulsed food source, the primary production. For higher trophic levels of plankton, these seasonal interactions are less well understood. Here, we study the mid-winter feeding of chaetognaths in high-Arctic fjord ecosystems. Chaetognaths are planktivorous predators which comprise high biomass in high-latitude seas. We investigated the common species Parasagitta elegans around the Svalbard archipelago (78–81°N) during the winters of 2012 and 2013. Our samples consisted of individuals (body lengths 9–55 mm) from three fjords, which were examined for gut contents (n = 903), stable isotopes, fatty acid composition, and maturity status (n = 352). About a quarter of the individuals contained gut contents, mainly lipid droplets and chitinous debris, whilst only 4 % contained identifiable prey, chiefly the copepods Calanus spp. and Metridia longa. The δ15N content of P. elegans, and its average trophic level of 2.9, confirmed its carnivorous position and its fatty acid profile [in particular its high levels of 20:1(n-9) and 22:1(n-11)] confirmed carnivory on Calanus. Observations of undeveloped gonads in many of the larger P. elegans, and the absence of small individuals <10 mm, suggested that reproduction had not started this early in the year. Its average feeding rate across fjords and years was 0.12 prey ind.−1 day−1, which is low compared to estimates of spring and summer feeding in high-latitude environments. Our findings suggest reduced feeding activity during winter and that predation by P. elegans had little impact on the mortality of copepods.