Teacher Practice

Historically, inequities in mathematics education have resulted in mathematics classrooms that do not support all students, and particularly students from marginalized backgrounds. Efforts to transform mathematics classrooms to be culturally responsive, sustaining, and justice-oriented have met limited success at scale. It may be that supporting teachers to develop more equitable teaching practices would benefit from a more incremental improvement approach.

Students benefit from dialogs about their explanations of complex scientific phenomena, and middle school science teachers cannot realistically provide all the guidance they need. We study ways to extend generative teacher–student dialogs to more students by using AI tools. We compare Responsive web-based dialogs to General web-based dialogs by evaluating the ideas students add and the quality of their revised explanations.

Environmental education is essential for protecting and restoring natural water sources. Integrating education with positive environmental experiences can instill values and stewardship in the public, encouraging proactive steps to preserve and enhance water resources. Elementary teachers can incorporate real-world water-related environmental issues into their classrooms, promoting critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Place-based education, which involves experiential learning in local settings, effectively builds connections between students and their communities.

Educative curriculum materials (ECM) have been shown to support K-12 teacher learning, but little is known about teacher educators’ use of ECM. In this study, we report on enactments of ECM designed to support the development of preservice elementary teachers’ content knowledge for teaching about matter in two different courses to understand how teacher educators use ECM. Participants were two full professors teaching science content and science methods courses for elementary preservice teachers at a public university in the Pacific Northwest.

Educative curriculum materials (ECM) have been shown to support K-12 teacher learning, but little is known about teacher educators’ use of ECM. In this study, we report on enactments of ECM designed to support the development of preservice elementary teachers’ content knowledge for teaching about matter in two different courses to understand how teacher educators use ECM. Participants were two full professors teaching science content and science methods courses for elementary preservice teachers at a public university in the Pacific Northwest.

Proportional reasoning is an important but challenging skill for students and teachers. This article, presents findings from two studies investigating whether four categories of reasoning identified by Copur-Gencturk et al. (2022, A Closer Look at Teachers’ Proportional Reasoning. International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, 21(1), 113–129) apply to a national sample of U.S. middle school mathematics teachers (N = 1,320) and can be captured consistently by similar tasks.

Two teachers—whose students were concerned about environmental injustices in their communities and eager to take action—initiated a collaboration to design freely available, customizable curriculum materials and a model professional development workshop. The workshop was designed to foster teacher efficacy in incorporating social justice into science teaching. To cultivate teacher efficacy, the materials were created to respond to middle school science teachers’ concerns about supporting students’ emotions around social justice issues and empowering students to take action.

Two teachers—whose students were concerned about environmental injustices in their communities and eager to take action—initiated a collaboration to design freely available, customizable curriculum materials and a model professional development workshop. The workshop was designed to foster teacher efficacy in incorporating social justice into science teaching. To cultivate teacher efficacy, the materials were created to respond to middle school science teachers’ concerns about supporting students’ emotions around social justice issues and empowering students to take action.

This report characterizes forms of dialogic support that a sixth-grade teacher generated during whole-class and small-group conversations to help students develop a practice of statistical modeling. During four weeks of instruction, students constructed and revised models to account for variability and uncertainty across a variety of random processes, many of which they experienced first-hand. Data sources for the research included field notes and video recordings of classroom conversations involving the teacher.

Although there has been increasing attention to the importance of teacher agency in professional development, there has been little attention to what it takes to facilitate collaborative work that both centers teachers’ assets and expertise and leads to productive learning. This paper presents a framework for focused and responsive facilitation of productive discourse around instructional practice in teacher learning communities.