Teacher Practice

Students’ difficulties with argumentation, proving, and the role of counterexamples in proving are well documented. Students in this study experienced an intervention for improving their argumentation and proving practices. The intervention included the eliminating counterexamples (ECE) framework as a means of constructing and critiquing viable arguments for a general claim. This framework involves constructing descriptions of all possible counterexamples to a conditional claim and determining whether or not a direct argument eliminates the possibility of counterexamples.

Students’ difficulties with contrapositive reasoning are well documented. Lack of intuition about contrapositive reasoning and lack of a meta-argument for the logical equivalence between a conditional claim and its contrapositive may contribute to students’ struggles. This case study investigated the effectiveness of the eliminating counterexamples intervention in improving students’ ability to construct, critique, and validate contrapositive arguments in a U.S. eighth-grade mathematics classroom.

While research shows that responsive teaching fosters students' disciplinary learning and equitable opportunities for participation, there is yet much to know about how teachers come to be responsive to their students' experiences in the science classroom. In this work, we set out to examine whether and how engaging teachers as learners in doing science may support responsive instructional practices.

This article describes one mathematics professional development program designed to support all K-5 students' engagement in productive mathematical discussions, in particular emergent multilingual learners.

Malzahn, K., Sztajn, P., & Heck, D. (October, 2019). Talk is the ticket to teaching math to English learners. The Learning Professional, 40(5).

In this paper, we analyze a PD design, examining its activities and the sequencing of professional learning tasks. We use a theoretical framework typically used in pre-service teacher education to understand the design of one PD program. Our overarching goal is to theorize about how to design PD and sequence professional learning tasks for practicing teachers.

In this chapter, we use the Framework for Teaching Practice (Grossman, et al., 2009) as a conceptual tool for analzying the design of professional development. Although initially developed to examine the education of prospective teachers, we contend that this framework is appropriate for analyzing and supporting the design of professional development. The framework consists of three elements: decompositions, representations, and approximations of practice.

Science teachers must sometimes teach outside of their expertise, and this type of teaching assignment is referred to as being out-of-field. Among newly hired teachers, this type of assignment may have a detrimental impact in the development of their instruction. This study explored the classroom instruction of 17 newly hired teachers who were teaching both in-field and out-of-field in the physical sciences during their first three years.

Special issue of the Journal of Science Teacher Education focused on out-of-field teaching in science.

Luft, J. A., Hobbs. L., & Hanuscin, D. (Eds.) (2020). Special issue: Out-of-field teaching in science. Journal of Science Teacher Education, 31(7), 719-820.

Special issue of the Journal of Science Teacher Education focused on out-of-field teaching in science.

Luft, J. A., Hobbs. L., & Hanuscin, D. (Eds.) (2020). Special issue: Out-of-field teaching in science. Journal of Science Teacher Education, 31(7), 719-820.

Many mathematics teachers agree that engaging students in high quality discourse is important for their conceptual learning, but successfully promoting such discourse in elementary classrooms—with attention to the needs of every learner—can be a challenge. Activating Math Talk tackles this challenge by bringing practical, math-specific, productive discourse techniques that are applicable to any lesson or curriculum.