Abstract
We employ Sfard’s (Thinking as communicating, 2008) “ritual towards exploration” idea to theorize the learning trajectory of two middle school teachers attending a professional development (PD) program designed around the 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Discussions and Accountable Talk. Data included four cycles of lesson recordings, including pre- and post-lesson interviews as well as recordings of all PD sessions. We operationalize ritual engagement in the teaching practices as rigid imitation of practices observed in the PD session and incoherence between teaching actions and underlying goals, whereas explorative engagement was characterized by flexibility and finer attunement of the practices to the context and to students’ needs. The development from ritual to explorative participation could be seen both in the practice of task selection and in the practice of orchestrating mathematical discussions. The change is exemplified on two lessons, recorded two months apart from each other.
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Notes
We note that there are some differences between the “participationist” views of Lave and Wenger (1991) and Sfard (2008) regarding the process of movement from peripheral to more “central” participation. Whereas Lave and Wenger (1991) emphasized the legitimization of newcomers’ peripheral participation and in fact claimed there is no final stage in which a participant becomes “completely central” in the community (and even that this process can be reversed, from central to peripheral participation), Sfard concentrated more on describing the differences between newcomers (young children’s) routines of participation and contrasting them with those of skillful participants (or adults). Our work, in this sense, is more aligned with Sfard (2008), yet we see no major contradiction with Lave and Wenger’s (1991) view. We, too, see the initial, ritual stages of participation as legitimate, indeed necessary, in the process of learning.
All names are pseudonyms.
From here on, we will call the two teachers “M & W” whenever referring to them as a couple and use their pseudonyms when referring to each one of them individually.
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This manuscript reports on a research conducted with the support of a Small Spencer Grant No. 201500080.
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Parts of the study reported in this manuscript were presented and published in Heyd-Metzuyanim, E. (2017). Emotional expressions as a window to processes of change in a mathematics classroom’s culture. In C. Andrà, D. Brunetto, E. Levenson, & P. Liljedahl (Eds.) Teaching and Learning in Maths Classrooms. Springer, and in Heyd-Metzuyanim, E., Smith, M., Bill, V, & Resnick, L.B. (2016). Change in teachers’ practices towards explorative instruction. In Csíkos, C., Rausch, A., & Szitányi, J. (Eds.). Proceedings of the 40th Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, Vol. 2, pp. 393-400. Szeged, Hungary: PME.
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Heyd-Metzuyanim, E., Smith, M., Bill, V. et al. From ritual to explorative participation in discourse-rich instructional practices: a case study of teacher learning through professional development. Educ Stud Math 101, 273–289 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-018-9849-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-018-9849-9