Classroom Practice

Teachers Experiences with Taking an Open-ended Approach in Teaching Labs in High School Physics Classes

Cadre-Admin — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 19:41:24 +0000

Teachers Experiences with Taking an Open-ended Approach in Teaching Labs in High School Physics Classes

Although most teachers recognize the importance of taking investigative, open-ended approaches to students’ learning experiences, implementing them in high school classes can be challenging for teachers. In this work, we analyzed data from multiple sources from a teaching Community of Practice (CoP) to investigate (a) barriers to taking an open-ended approach in teaching labs in physics classes, (b) shifts in teachers’ beliefs about taking an open-ended approach during their engagement in a physics teaching CoP in a partnership program, and (c) a case study of one teacher whose shifts in perceptions about taking an open-ended approach in teaching labs led to her successful implementation in her class. The findings confirm the existence of well-known psychological and structural barriers that can prevent teachers from adopting investigative approaches in teaching physics labs. Moreover, we learned how the interaction of these barriers further complicates the adoption of open-ended approaches in physics classes. The study also revealed a significant gap between teachers’ current practices and their desired methods of conducting labs, particularly in terms of structured versus open-ended approaches. The case study offered deeper insights into how shifts in teaching practices occur through changes in perceptions within a supportive CoP.

Talafian, H., Lundsgaard, M., Mahmood, M., Kuo, E & Stelzer, T. J. (2025). Teachers’ experiences with taking an open-ended approach in teaching labs in high school physics classes. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 21(1), 010140. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.21.010140

Cadre-Admin Mon, 02/02/2026 - 14:41

https://journals.aps.org/prper/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.21.010140

Designing a Tool for Teacher Noticing for Equity in Mathematics Instruction

Cadre-Admin — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 19:20:08 +0000

Designing a Tool for Teacher Noticing for Equity in Mathematics Instruction

In this paper, we propose a mathematics professional development tool designed to support teachers’ noticing for equity and improve their ability to provide powerful mathematics and an inclusive discourse community for each and every student. Used within the context of coaching cycles, this tool serves as a reflection guide for teachers to consider the extent to which all students had opportunities and access to rigorous mathematics and a discourse community and were engaged as doers and communicators of mathematics during a lesson. Our theoretical basis for the tool and iterative design process are described, followed by an example of its utility. We conclude with a discussion of what we learned from our retrospective analysis of our process.

Yilmaz, Z., Malzahn, K., Heck, D., Sztajn, P. & Shaver, E. (2024, November). Designing a tool for teacher noticing for equity in mathematics instruction. In K. W. Kosko, J. Cani-glia, S. A. Courtney, M. Zolfaghari, & G. A. Morris. Proceedings of the 46th annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (pp. 1934-1943). Kent State University. https://www.pmena.org/pmenaproceedings/PMENA%2046%202024%20Proceedings.pdf

Cadre-Admin Mon, 02/02/2026 - 14:20

https://www.pmena.org/pmenaproceedings/PMENA%2046%202024%20Proceedings.pdf

Designing a Tool for Teacher Noticing for Equity in Mathematics Instruction

Cadre-Admin — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 19:20:08 +0000

Designing a Tool for Teacher Noticing for Equity in Mathematics Instruction

Cadre-Admin Mon, 02/02/2026 - 14:20

https://www.pmena.org/pmenaproceedings/PMENA%2046%202024%20Proceedings.pdf

Developing a Teaching Reflection Tool

Cadre-Admin — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 19:14:13 +0000

Developing a Teaching Reflection Tool

Teacher reflection on the teaching and learning of mathematics is essential for driving instructional change. While teacher noticing is key to reflecting, this skill does not necessarily develop through teaching experience alone. Professional learning (PL) opportunities can play a critical role in supporting teachers’ use of reflection to purposefully cultivate their understanding of ways to attend, interpret and act on significant instructional moments (van Es et al., 2017). This oral communication focuses on the steps used to design, develop and pilot a reflection framework used with coaching support to enhance teachers’ ability to notice key aspects of high-quality mathematics discourse in the classroom. The study was conducted in the context of Project AIM (All Included in Mathematics), a professional development program focused on high-quality discourse (Sztajn et al., 2021) that provides K-2 teachers with 30 hours of PL over one year and opportunities to engage in coaching cycles using the reflection framework in the following year.

Sztajn, P., Heck, D., Malzahn, K., & Yilmaz, Z. (2025, July). Developing a teaching reflection tool. In C. Cornejo, P. Felmer, D. M. Gómez, P. Dartnell, P. Araya, A. Peri, & V. Randolph (Eds.), Proceedings of the 48th conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (p. 332). Universidad de Chile. https://www.igpme.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/PME48_GeneralContributions_ISSN_3081-0833.pdf

Cadre-Admin Mon, 02/02/2026 - 14:14

https://www.igpme.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/PME48_GeneralContributions_ISS…

Developing a Teaching Reflection Tool

Cadre-Admin — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 19:14:13 +0000

Developing a Teaching Reflection Tool

Cadre-Admin Mon, 02/02/2026 - 14:14

https://www.igpme.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/PME48_GeneralContributions_ISS…

Using Partner Interviews to Support Language and Mathematics Development for Elementary Multilingual Learners

Cadre-Admin — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 22:40:50 +0000

Using Partner Interviews to Support Language and Mathematics Development for Elementary Multilingual Learners

While peer-to-peer conversations can be beneficial for children’s linguistic and mathematical development, the specific conditions needed to support optimal conversations remain elusive. As part of a larger project to infuse peer-to-peer interactions into mathematics instruction for multilingual students, 8- to 11-year-old children in the U.S. were videotaped by their teachers interviewing one another about their solution strategies to equal sharing problems. Partner Interviews were analyzed to determine the quality of the interactions between pairs using Barwell’s (2023) definition of negotiating meaning. This study examines the relationships among the quality of student negotiations, accuracy of strategies, similarities between strategies, and grade levels. Findings indicate that the degree to which students negotiated each other’s ideas varied, and the accuracy of students’ solutions was related to the quality of their negotiations. We provide a framework for assessing the quality of the peer-to-peer negotiations as well as concrete examples of the structures and scaffolds used to elicit these conversations.

Restani, R., Ambrose, R., Martin, R., Jiménez-Silva, M., Abdelrahim, S., Xu, X., Huynh, A., & Albano, A. (2026). Using partner interviews to support language and mathematics development for elementary multilingual learners. International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, 24(8).

Cadre-Admin Tue, 01/27/2026 - 17:40

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10763-025-10624-0

Incorporating Participatory Science in Elementary Schools: Teacher and Student Experiences with Outdoor Learning

Cadre-Admin — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 22:23:13 +0000

Incorporating Participatory Science in Elementary Schools: Teacher and Student Experiences with Outdoor Learning

Science instruction in elementary school provides a base for student understanding of the natural world, yet policies prioritizing mathematics and reading have marginalized science. In response, some teachers have enhanced their science instruction by introducing students to participatory science (PS) projects. Using data from a larger study that examines the development of educative support materials for two existing PS projects, this embedded mixed methods study focuses on teachers’ and students’ experiences learning outdoors. We compare teachers’ weekly log data, surveys, interviews, observations, and student focus groups to document teachers’ applications of PS in their science classrooms and outdoors. Teachers report benefits (e.g., purposeful science learning) and challenges (e.g., time constraints, testing pressure) of implementing outdoor PS projects. Teacher and student data document cognitive and affective benefits of students’ participation. Implications support the potential for PS projects that include schoolyard activities to supplement elementary science teaching and learning.

Carrier, S. J., Scharen, D. R., Hayes, M. L., Smith, P. S., Goforth, C., Craven, L., & Sachs, L. (2026). Incorporating participatory science in elementary schools: Teacher and student experiences with outdoor learning. Electronic Journal for Research in Science and Mathematics, 29(4).

Cadre-Admin Tue, 01/27/2026 - 17:23

https://ejrsme.icrsme.com/article/view/23817

Collective (Un)Learning: A Self-Examination of Science Teacher Educators' Evolving Translanguaging Pedagogy for Eliciting and Elevating Student Ideas

Cadre-Admin — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 21:55:34 +0000

Collective (Un)Learning: A Self-Examination of Science Teacher Educators' Evolving Translanguaging Pedagogy for Eliciting and Elevating Student Ideas

This study centers the idea that it is not just what science teacher educators (STEs) teach, but how they teach it, that matters. To prepare future teachers who can enact more equitable and transformative reform-oriented science instruction with multilingual learners, research must explore what STEs are doing, and how, to develop preservice teachers' expansive views of language and understandings around the nuanced ways students might use their diverse language repertoires for sensemaking. Wanting to explore whether our instructional practices as STEs aligned to the translanguaging pedagogy we espouse within our bilingual elementary science methods course, we employed self-study methodology to critically examine our own instruction across a semester, specifically in terms of how we engaged in the core practice of “eliciting student ideas.” Findings revealed particularities around the evolution of our translanguaging pedagogy with respect to this core practice, the extensive and intentional effort that went into designing learning activities strongly suited to facilitate our elicitation of PSTs' ideas in language-expansive ways, and the vulnerable space that we had to hold, as individuals and as a collective, in order to (un)learn and carry out this work. These findings highlight the importance of STEs addressing their own continued professional growth, and of the power of collaboration in supporting this growth through self-examination and loving self-critique. Furthermore, findings suggest the importance of intentionally eliciting and elevating PSTs' ideas both implicitly and explicitly, and for needing to attend to the emotional and relational aspects of learning environments to support students' language use.

María González-Howard, M., Méndez Pérez, K., Andersen, S., Robinson, C., & Garza, L. (2025). Collective (un)learning: A self-examination of science teacher educators' evolving translanguaging pedagogy for eliciting and elevating student ideas. Science Education. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.70044

Cadre-Admin Tue, 01/27/2026 - 16:55

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sce.70044

Interrogating Whiteness in Mathematics Education Research: A Discourse Analysis of Storylines About Latiné Communities

Cadre-Admin — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 22:50:39 +0000

Interrogating Whiteness in Mathematics Education Research: A Discourse Analysis of Storylines About Latiné Communities

Society produces storylines about Latiné communities, including their placement in racial and linguistic hierarchies, that permeate the mathematics classroom and research in mathematics education. We conducted a discourse analysis of the enunciations used in top-tier mathematics education journals about these communities. The majority of articles we examined functioned to maintain white supremacy by centering dominant (white) storylines and values to maintain a racial hierarchy, with whites above Latiné and other marginalized groups. However, our findings also illuminate the counter-stories of Latiné communities in mathematics education research literature. We call for a more critical look at the field of mathematics education research and the norms that have been set for conducting, disseminating, and reflecting on research endeavors about marginalized groups.

Jones, S. R. & Gómez Marchant, C. N. (2025). Interrogating whiteness in mathematics education research: A discourse analysis of storylines about Latiné communities. Journal for Research in Mathematics, 56(5), 283–303. https://doi.org/10.5951/jresematheduc-2021-0093

Cadre-Admin Mon, 12/15/2025 - 17:50

https://pubs.nctm.org/view/journals/jrme/56/5/article-p283.xml

How Educational Leaders Think About Intersections of Identities and Disciplinary Learning in Science

Cadre-Admin — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 22:43:15 +0000

How Educational Leaders Think About Intersections of Identities and Disciplinary Learning in Science

American science education leaders play critical roles in promoting equity in education, but little is known about how they understand everyday classroom interactions where inequities related to intersectionality are evident. This study examines science leaders' sensemaking about a scenario depicting the experiences of a group of American Black girl elementary students in an engineering design lesson, focusing on what leaders notice and how they propose to intervene to address problematic aspects of the students' experience. The responses were part of a survey given to a purposeful sample of 140 science education leaders from 18 states and analyzed by a team guided by an understanding of science as embedded within intersectional systems of oppression linked to race and racism, and gender and sexism. Most leaders noticed the students' experience was problematic; however, few respondents remarked on how racism or sexism might explain the students' experience. Most proposed interventions only with students or teachers, rather than addressing larger systemic issues that might have contributed to the situation. Our data suggest opportunities to support science education leaders and educators to have conversations that develop intersectional interpretations of everyday classroom practices and dynamics, as part of their efforts to promote equity in education.

Ceperich, R., Penuel, W. R., Allen, A., Tran, T., Del Val, Y. S., Leonhart, S., Rhinehart, A., & Davidson, K. (2025). How educational leaders think about intersections of identities and disciplinary learning in science. School Science and Mathematics. https://doi.org/10.1111/ssm.70000

Cadre-Admin Mon, 12/15/2025 - 17:43

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ssm.70000