TRUmath and Lesson Study: Supporting Fundamental and Sustainable Improvement in High School Mathematics Teaching (Collaborative Research: Donovan)

Given the changes in instructional practices needed to support high quality mathematics teaching and learning based on college and career readiness standards, school districts need to provide professional learning opportunities for teachers that support those changes. The project is based on the TRUmath framework and will build a coherent and scalable plan for providing these opportunities in high school mathematics departments, a traditionally difficult unit of organizational change.

Project URL: 
https://tru-lessonstudy.org
Full Description: 

Given the changes in instructional practices needed to support high quality mathematics teaching and learning based on college and career readiness standards, school districts need to provide professional learning opportunities for teachers that support those changes. The project will build a coherent and scalable plan for providing these opportunities in high school mathematics departments, a traditionally difficult unit of organizational change. Based on the TRUmath framework, characterizing the five essential dimensions of powerful mathematics classrooms, the project brings together a focus on curricular materials that support teaching, Lesson Study protocols and materials, and a professional learning community-based professional development model. The project will design and revise professional development and coaching guides and lesson study mathematical resources built around the curricular materials. The project will study changes in instructional practice and impact on student learning. By documenting the supports used in the Oakland Unified School District where the research and development will be conducted, the resources can be used by other districts and in similar work by other research-practice partnerships.

This project hypothesizes that the quality of classroom instruction can be defined by five dimensions - quality of the mathematics; cognitive demand of the tasks; access to mathematics content in the classroom; student agency, authority, and identity; and uses of assessment. The project will use an iterative design process to develop and refine a suite of tool, including a conversation guide to support productive dialogue between teachers and coaches, support materials for building site-based professional learning materials, and formative assessment lessons using Lesson Study as a mechanism to enact reforms of these dimensions. The study will use a pre-post design and natural variation to student the relationships between these dimensions, changes in teachers' instructional practice, and student learning using hierarchical linear modeling with random intercept models with covariates. Qualitative of the changes in teachers' instructional practices will be based on coding of observations based on the TRUmath framework. The study will also use qualitative analysis techniques to identify themes from surveys and interviews on factors that promote or hinder the effectiveness of the intervention.

TRU-Lesson Study Publications
(An asterisk* indicates the paper is available on the TRU website, https://truframework.org/)

 Project-Specific:

*Schoenfeld, A. H. (2019). Reframing Teacher Knowledge: A Research and Development Agenda. In J. Star, H. Hill, & F. Depaepe (Eds.). Expertise to develop students’ expertise in mathematics: Bridging teachers’ professional knowledge and instructional quality. ZDM: Mathematics education, Volume 52, Issue 1, 2020. DOI: 10.1007/s11858-019-01057-5

*Schoenfeld, A., Dosalmas, A., Fink, H., Sayavedra, A., Weltman, A., Zarkh, A, Tran, K., & Zuniga-Ruiz, S. (2019). Teaching for Robust Understanding with Lesson Study In Huang, R., Takahashi, A., & Ponte, J.P. (Eds.), Theory and Practices of Lesson Study in Mathematics: An international perspective (pp. 136-162). New York: Springer. ISBN 978-3-030-04031-4

*Schoenfeld, A. H., Baldinger, E., Disston, J., Donovan, S., Dosalmas, A., Driskill, M., Fink, H., Foster, D., Haumersen, R., Lewis, C., Louie, N., Mertens, A., Murray, E., Narasimhan, L., Ortega, C., Reed, M., Ruiz, S., Sayavedra, A., Sola, T., Tran, K., Weltman, A., Wilson, D., & Zarkh, A. (2019). Learning with and from TRU: Teacher Educators and the Teaching for Robust Understanding Framework. In K. Beswick (Ed.), International Handbook of Mathematics Teacher Education, Volume 4, The Mathematics Teacher Educator as a Developing Professional (pp. 271-304). Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense publishers.

Project-Related:

Lewis, C. & Perry, R. (2017). Lesson study to improve fractions learning: A randomized, controlled trial. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 48:2, 261-299.

Lewis, C. (2016). How does lesson study improve mathematics instruction? ZDM 48:4, 571-580. DOI: 10.1007/s11858-016-0792-x

Lewis, C., & Perry, R. (2015). A Randomized trial of lesson study with mathematical resource kits: Analysis of impact on teachers’ beliefs and learning community. In E. J. Cai & Middleton (Ed.), Design, Results, and Implications of Large-Scale Studies in Mathematics Education. New York: Springer, 133-155.

*Schoenfeld, A. H. (2013). Classroom observations in theory and practice. ZDM, the International Journal of Mathematics Education, 45: 6-7-621. DOI 10.1007/s11858-012-0483-1.

*Schoenfeld, A. H. (2014, November). What makes for powerful classrooms, and how can we support teachers in creating them? Educational Researcher, 43(8), 404-412. DOI: 10.3102/0013189X1455 *Schoenfeld, A.H. (2015). Thoughts on scale. ZDM, the international journal of mathematics education, 47, 161-169. DOI: 10.1007/s11858-014-0662-3.

*Schoenfeld, A. H. (2017). Teaching for Robust understanding of essential mathematics. In T. McDougal, (Ed.), Essential Mathematics for the Next Generation: What and How Students Should Learn (pp. 104-129). Tokyo, Japan: Tokyo Gagukei University

*Schoenfeld, A. H. (2020). Mathematical practices, in theory and practice. ZDM, 52(6), 1163-1176. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-020-01162-w

*Schoenfeld, A. H. (2020). Addressing Horizontal and Vertical gaps in Educational Systems European Review. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1062798720000940

Schoenfeld, A.H. It's Time for an Academic Reset. Graduate School of Education, U.C. Berkeley. https://gse.berkeley.edu/news/its-time-academic-reset

*Schoenfeld, A. H., Floden, R. B., and the algebra teaching study and mathematics assessment projects. (2018). On Classroom Observations. Journal of STEM Education Research https://doi.org/10.1007/s41979-018-0001-7

Project Materials

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