Co-learning Math Teaching Project: Collaborative Structures to Support Learning to Teach across the Professional Teaching Continuum

This project will design and study an innovative model of collaborative learning for pre-service and experienced elementary, middle, and secondary mathematics teachers that focuses on equitable mathematics teaching practices that include understanding students' knowledge, math understandings, and experiences they bring to the classroom.

Full Description

An ongoing challenge for the preparation of new mathematics teachers is creating quality experiences in classrooms for student teaching. The project will design and study an innovative model of collaborative learning for pre-service and experienced elementary, middle, and secondary mathematics teachers. Multiple pre-service teachers will collaborate in the same secondary mathematics teacher's classroom for their field placements. The partnership between the school and the university will allow for professional development for the pre-service teachers and the experienced teachers. A particular focus of the project will be equity-oriented math teaching. Developing equitable mathematics teaching practices includes better understanding students' knowledge, math understandings, and experiences they bring to the classroom. Improving all types of field experiences in teacher education programs, including the student teaching experience, may improve retention in the teaching profession and help pre-service teachers be better prepared for their first years of teaching.

This is an exploratory project about mathematics teaching and teacher development in field experiences for pre-service teachers. The project introduces collaborative learning structures for pre-service teacher education that focus on equitable mathematics teaching practices. The collaborative learning structures include both the cooperating teacher and multiple pre-service teachers working in the same classroom. The project will use a design-based research model to systematically study the process of co-learning and the critical features of collaborative learning structures as they are designed to support co-learning between novice and experienced teachers. Multiple universities are included in the project in order to compare the model in different settings. The project has two research questions. First, how do pre-service teachers and cooperating teachers co-learn? More specifically, what vision, dispositions, understandings and practices of justification and generalization does each teacher develop during their time together? How does each teacher's vision, dispositions, understandings, and practices of mathematics teaching shift during their time together? Second, what are the design characteristics of the collaborative learning structures that support or inhibit pre-service teachers and cooperating teachers in learning? The design research study will collect audio and video recordings and artifacts from dyads’ use of collaborative learning tools. Data collection and analyses will occur in annual cycles to inform tool design and revision as well as a theory of co-learning.

PROJECT KEYWORDS

Project Materials