Discourse

Enacting reform-oriented, phenomenon-based instruction provides us an opportunity to more equitably teach science. Particularly, our teaching can be stronger when we elicit, notice and then use all students’ ideas and questions to inform how students collaborate to figure out phenomena. However, this is only possible if we learn to expansively notice the many language resources multilingual students have available for sharing their thinking, which requires teachers to see and hear beyond what has been traditionally privileged in school spaces.

This conceptual paper presents a framework for supporting multilingual students’ mathematical discourse through teacher professional development grounded in design-based research (DBR). Drawing on sociocultural learning theory, the Integrated Language and Mathematics Project (ILMP) was co-developed with elementary educators to promote integrated instruction that simultaneously advances students’ mathematical understanding, language development, and cultural identity.

Fostering student engagement with mathematical reasoning and proving requires a special kind of teacher knowledge – Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching Proof (MKT-P). One important component of MKT-P is Knowledge of Content and Teaching specific to Proof (KCT-P), which is knowledge of pedagogical practices for supporting student learning of proof. Providing effective feedback on students' mathematical arguments is one of the key aspects of KCT-P.

Reform-oriented science classrooms encourage environments in which students engage in a collective enterprise of making sense of their science ideas together. Teachers who strive for these sorts of environments support students in collaboratively constructing and answering their own questions about phenomena and making sense of competing ideas together.

We extend research that connects teacher noticing expertise and instructional quality by providing rich illustrations of these connections at three levels of noticing expertise. Grounded in a vision of teaching that is responsive to children’s mathematical thinking, we investigated connections between teachers’ expertise in noticing children’s thinking and their centering of children’s thinking in whole-class discussions. We showcase three upper elementary school teachers as focal teachers, each with a different level of noticing expertise.

In this mixed-methods study, we introduce an activity-based perspective on mathematical authority that considers who leads mathematical activities in a classroom. Our framework for mathematical authority extends existing research that focuses primarily on Authoring mathematical ideas to include the activities of Visualizing and Speaking. Using data from 129 lessons, we identified six authority structures that reflect consistencies in how mathematical authority was distributed across Authoring, Speaking, and Visualizing.

Student participation in science discourse requires multiple levels of support through tools such as curricular materials, as well as teacher talk. The actions of the teacher can provide opportunities for students to engage in disciplinary science talk. The norms associated with this talk can be used to define what students sound like when engaged in authentic science talk. However, often talk moves are employed in service of in-the-moment tasks rather than development of disciplinary talk norms.

This article presents results from a design experiment intended to develop students’ understanding of linear functions and rates of change in a linguistically diverse ninth grade classroom. The intervention focused on fostering classroom discussions. Students’ pre-post assessment gains were higher in the redesigned classrooms than in the pre-intervention classrooms. Additionally, multilingual students who were classified as English Learners (ELs) made larger gains than their non-EL peers, and the majority of student learning gains occurred on conceptually-focused items.

Teaching science to elementary school students is complex, and teacher preparation programs must support preservice teachers’ learning to communicate science content and practices with children. Science teachers bring the experiences they have as students to their teacher preparation, and these experiences may support or conflict with what they are learning about effective teaching. In this study, we present stories of two first-year teachers who attended a STEM-focused teacher preparation program in the U.S.

We consider how intentionally planned and facilitated whole-class conversations can “make space” for students’ sense-making about engineering problems and solutions and position them with epistemic authority to contribute to collective thinking. We conducted a case study on a first-grade engineering lesson that included whole-class Idea Generation and Design Synthesis Talks. We found students sense-making as they refined their design proposals and analyses in light of classmates’ contributions to the whole-class conversations.