Steps Toward a More Inclusive Mathematics Pedagogy

Abstract

This chapter is based on an action research project with the mathematics teaching staff of a school that serves special needs students from grades 2 to 12. Now in its fifth year, and with the aim of refining practices to ensure that all students have the opportunity to learn, the collaboration has adopted the analogy that “learning to teach differently is like learning another language.” This framing has highlighted the complexities, difficulties, and strategies associated with shifting from highly familiar standardized, teacher-centered classroom practices to more authentic emphases that are consonant with reform efforts. In this chapter, we report on the power of this frame to effect transformations in teachers’ beliefs and actions, while also highlighting how easily one’s “native language” can seep into, undermine, and obscure efforts at transformation. By way of initial example, through action research, strategies have been implemented to ensure teachers are constantly aware of multiple learner interpretations, yet there is a persistent recurrence in classrooms of questions of the form “Can anyone tell me…?” We argue that such questions may be indicative of a mode of directive teaching that is aimed at a “representative learner,” in contrast to a mode of responsive teaching that is attentive to the sense(s) that each learner might actually be making.