- Year 2022
- NSF Noyce Award # 1660752
- First Name Sherri
- Last Name Martinie
- Institution Kansas State University
- Role/Position Associate Professor
- Workshop Category Track 1: Scholarships and Stipends
- Workshop Disciplines Audience Mathematics
- Target Audience Co-PIs, Noyce Master Teachers, Noyce Teaching Fellows, Other Faculty/Staff, Project PIs, School District Administrators, Undergraduate and/or Graduate Noyce Scholars
- Topics Community Building: Supporting Teacher Educators and Pre-Service Teachers, Developing Teachers’ Ability to Cultivate Diverse/Equitable/Inclusive Classrooms to Achieve Excellent STEMM Teaching and Learning
- Session Length 75 minutes minutes
Goals
1. Gain a deeper understanding of the math teaching practice of “promote productive struggle”2. Identify factors of maintenance and decline of a rigorous task3. Explore possible teacher responses to struggle and identify them as productive and unproductive4. Consider steps to create a learning environment and prepare to support productive struggle
Evidence
Mathematical tasks framework & Factors associated with the maintenance or decline of high-level-cognitive demand tasks (Stein & Smith, 1998, Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School)5 teachers responses to struggle (Smith, M. S., Steele, M. D., & Raith, M. L. (2017). Taking actions: Implementing effective mathematics teaching practices. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.)Teacher actions identified in case study of first year teacher/Noyce scholar alumni that facilitate and support productive struggle (Nusser & Martinie article titled “Teacher Engagement in and Exploration of Productive Struggle” submitted to Theory and Practice in Rural Education
Proposal
A great deal happens from the time a teacher examines a math task as it appears in the instructional materials to the time when students engage in the task that can significantly impact student learning. The teacher makes decisions regarding the set-up of the task and makes decisions as the task is implemented. These decisions and actions impact the maintenance or decline of the rigor of the task. Tasks that promote reasoning and problems solving are more likely to promote struggle and the need to persevere. There are actions teachers can take to promote productive struggle rather than take over student thinking. To better understand how the math teaching practice of “support productive struggle” translates from a basic level of understanding as a preservice teacher to actual classroom practice as a first-year teacher, we selected a first-year rural mathematics teacher’s to examining this practice. We investigated her engagement in facilitating productive struggle by (1) probing her intellectual understanding of productive struggle and (2) looking at multiple aspects of the instructional prospect. This session will begin by illustrating specific teacher actions to support productive struggle and will end with implications for teachers based on what we learned by observing this in practice.
