Classroom Practice

This study investigated teachers’ responses to a common set of instances of student mathematical thinking (SMT) with varied potential to support students’ mathematical learning, as well as the productivity of such responses.

This study investigated teachers’ responses to a common set of instances of student mathematical thinking (SMT) with varied potential to support students’ mathematical learning, as well as the productivity of such responses.

This study investigated teachers’ responses to a common set of instances of student mathematical thinking (SMT) with varied potential to support students’ mathematical learning, as well as the productivity of such responses.

The purpose of this study is to characterize teachers’ orientations toward using student mathematical thinking as a resource during whole-class instruction.

The purpose of this study is to characterize teachers’ orientations toward using student mathematical thinking as a resource during whole-class instruction.

The purpose of this study is to characterize teachers’ orientations toward using student mathematical thinking as a resource during whole-class instruction.

We argue that progress in the area of research on mathematics teacher responses to student thinking could be enhanced were the field to attend more explicitly to important facets of those responses, as well as to related units of analysis. We describe the Teacher Response Coding scheme (TRC) to illustrate how such attention might play out, and then apply the TRC to an excerpt of classroom mathematics discourse to demonstrate the affordances of this approach. We conclude by making several further observations about the potential versatility and power in articulating units of analysis and developing and applying tools that attend to these facets when conducting research on teacher responses.

We argue that progress in the area of research on mathematics teacher responses to student thinking could be enhanced were the field to attend more explicitly to important facets of those responses, as well as to related units of analysis. We describe the Teacher Response Coding scheme (TRC) to illustrate how such attention might play out, and then apply the TRC to an excerpt of classroom mathematics discourse to demonstrate the affordances of this approach. We conclude by making several further observations about the potential versatility and power in articulating units of analysis and developing and applying tools that attend to these facets when conducting research on teacher responses.

We argue that progress in the area of research on mathematics teacher responses to student thinking could be enhanced were the field to attend more explicitly to important facets of those responses, as well as to related units of analysis. We describe the Teacher Response Coding scheme (TRC) to illustrate how such attention might play out, and then apply the TRC to an excerpt of classroom mathematics discourse to demonstrate the affordances of this approach. We conclude by making several further observations about the potential versatility and power in articulating units of analysis and developing and applying tools that attend to these facets when conducting research on teacher responses.

Ambiguity is a natural part of communication in a mathematics classroom. In this paper, a particular subset of ambiguity is characterized as clarifiable. Clarifiable ambiguity in classroom mathematics discourse is common, frequently goes unaddressed, and unnecessarily hinders in-the-moment communication because it likely could be made more clear in a relatively straightforward way if it were attended to. We argue for deliberate attention to clarifiable ambiguity as a critical aspect of attending to meaning and as a necessary precursor to productive use of student mathematical thinking.