- Year 2018
- NSF Noyce Award # 1439867
- First Name Wendy
- Last Name Smith
- Discipline Math
- Co-PI(s)
Lorraine M. Males, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, lmales2@unl.edu
- Presenters
Lorraine M. Males, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, lmales2@unl.edu
Need
Planning is one of the most critical activities in improving teaching (Morris, Hiebert, & Spitzer, 2009) and with more than 80% of K- 12 teachers use a textbook or curricular program for mathematics instruction (Banilower et al. 2013), learning to plan with curriculum materials is important. In addition, it is critical in understanding how to support early career teachers, such as Noyce TFs to do this complex and important work.
Goals
The goal for this portion of our Noyce Phase II: Monitoring and Evaluation grant were to a) to gain insight into how our Noyce TFs and Noyce MFTs plan and to determine whether, and if so how, these TFs (student teachers) were influenced by the MTFs (who served as cooperating teachers). In order to do this we engaged over 25 Noyce TFs and MTFs in Staged Planning Interviews (described below). We report on three pairs in this poster.
Approach
Three researchers (including Noyce Co-PI and PI) conducted semi-structured staged planning interviews (e.g., teachers planned hypothetical lessons) with TFs and MTFs.
We draw on a framework called Curricular Noticing (Males, Earnest, Amador, & Dietiker, 2015) to describe what teachers attend to, their interpretations of what they attend to, and how they respond to (or make decisions) about how to use curriculum materials to plan lessons. This framework was used to code interviews and we looked for themes across all TF, MTF, and TF/MTF pairs.
Outcomes
Not only could we identify similarities and difference in their plans, but we can see the influence of MTFs on TFs planning. For two out of the three pairings the percentages of instances coded in each phase was similar. For pair 1 the highest percentage was Interpret followed by Attend, Respond, and Meta in that order. Pair 2 had the highest percentage of Attend codes followed by Interpret, Respond, and Meta in that order. Although Respond and Meta were the lowest percentages for pair 3 the TF?s greatest percentage was Attend and the MTFs was Interpret. Using the qualitative data (i.e., what was said in these coded instances) we are still exploring the connections that might exist between pairings and how this has influenced their planning practices.
Broader Impacts
The TFs and MTFs benefitted from the interview as it gave them a unique opportunity to plan with materials that are different from the ones that they would normally use.
We presented this work at conferences such as the NCTM Research Conference, PME-NA Conference and will submit a journal article this summer.
