Abstract
Detracking and heterogeneous groupwork are two educational practices that have been shown to have promise for affording all students needed learning opportunities to develop mathematical proficiency. However, teachers face significant pedagogical challenges in organizing productive groupwork in these settings. This study offers an analysis of one teacher’s role in creating a classroom system that supported student collaboration within groups in a detracked, heterogeneous geometry classroom. The analysis focuses on four categories of the teacher’s work that created a set of affordances to support within group collaborative practices and links the teacher’s work with principles of complex systems.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Melissa Gresalfi for her insightful and generative feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript. I would also like to thank Jo Boaler for her guidance in the design of this project. Finally, I extend my deep appreciation to Linda McClure and her geometry class for allowing me to be a part of their classroom community.
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An earlier version of this article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, 2007 as part of the Tracking and Detracking SIG session Teaching, Learning, and Other Outcomes in Tracked and Detracked Environments.
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Staples, M.E. Promoting student collaboration in a detracked, heterogeneous secondary mathematics classroom. J Math Teacher Educ 11, 349–371 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10857-008-9078-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10857-008-9078-8