- Year 2023
- NSF Noyce Award # 1852908
- First Name Paula
- Last Name Jakopovic
- Institution University of Nebraska at Omaha
- Role/Position co-PI
- Workshop Category Track 1: Scholarships and Stipends
- Workshop Disciplines Audience Mathematics
- Target Audience Co-PIs, Evaluators/Education Researchers, Other Faculty/Staff, Project PIs
- Topics Partnerships for Success (High-need schools/informal institutions/industry/community), Program Management and/or Sustainability, Research/Assessment/Evaluation
- Session Length 30 minutes minutes
Goals
In this session, participants will: (1) Engage in discussion around case study materials examining the experiences of preservice teachers in learning assistantships, (2)Examine key features and tools that can support the pedagogical content knowledge and mathematical knowledge for teaching development of preservice teachers through structured mentoring and reflective activities, and (3) Reflect and share about existing and new ideas to further develop preservice teachers’ confidence and competence as mathematics teachers and teacher leaders.
Evidence
In this workshop session we will unpack findings from the NebraskaMath Omaha Noyce: Phase II project examining the experiences of undergraduate students/preservice teachers in our program who engaged in a blend of clinical experiences through the teacher education and mathematics departments at UNO. We will briefly describe data analysis of participants’ written reflections and focus group interviews from Fall 2021. Situated learning theory (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) postulates that learning is an intrinsic component of participating in a group or organization. Value can exist in a variety of types, including immediate (in the moment), potential (for the future), applied (tested implementation), realized (actualized implementation), and transformative (broader dissemination to others) (Wenger et al., 2011; Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2014). As research practitioners, framing value as a fluid and interconnected process affords us the ability to explore the varied layers of student experiences within their social and academic contexts (Wenger, 1998; Wenger et al., 2011). We utilized this value framework to identify aspects of teaching and learning experiences that our participants found value in and interrogate how those are linked to their development as future teachers. Our previous findings support preservice teachers’ attending to facets of understanding learners and identifying effective mathematics teaching practices (Gomez Johnson et al., 2021; Jakopovic & Gomez Johnson, 2023), as well as movement along Fuller’s (1969) stages of teacher concern and pedagogical and mathematical content knowledge due to program components (Ball et al., 2008; Hill et al., 2008). In our session, we will unpack the framework and analysis before sharing relevant excerpts from the data that highlight some of the salient programmatic features and the ways in which they enhanced participants’ experiences as future teachers. References:
Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE). (2017). Standards for preparing teachers of mathematics. Author. http://amte.net/standards Ball, D., Thames, M., & Phelps, G. (2008) Content knowledge for teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 59(5), 389-407.
Darling-Hammond, L, Chung, R., & Frelow, F. (2002). Variation in teacher preparation: How well do different pathways prepare teachers to teach? Journal of Teacher Education, 53(4), 286-302.
Fuller, F. F. (1969). Concerns of Teachers: A Developmental Conceptualization. American Educational Research Journal, 6(2), 207–226. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312006002207
Hill, H., Blunk, M., Charalambous, C., Lewis, J., Phelps, G., Sleep, L., and Ball, D. (2008), “Mathematical knowledge for teaching and the mathematical quality of instruction: an exploratory study”, Cognition and Instruction, Vol. 26 No. 4, pp. 430-511.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press.
Wenger, E., Trayner, B., & de Laat, M. (2011). Promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks: A conceptual framework. Open University of the Netherlands.
Wenger-Trayner, E., & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2014). Learning in a landscape of practice: A framework. In E. Wenger-Trayner, M. Fenton-O’Creevy, S. Hutchinson, C. Kubiak, & B. Wenger-Trayner (Eds.), Learning in landscapes of practice: Boundaries, identity, and knowledgeability in practice-based learning (pp. 13–29). Routledge.
Proposal
The Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (2017) cites the important role teacher preparation programs play in providing opportunities for preservice teachers to learn mathematics content and pedagogy and to engage in real world teaching experiences in clinical settings. Content and pedagogical coursework and field experiences are pillars of most teacher preparation programs (Darling-Hammond et al., 2002); however, examining the design, execution, and impact of particular models on student development and what they find valuable in their experiences are less prevalent in research. Our project team explored an innovative model for teacher development created in collaboration with university faculty from both the teacher preparation and mathematics departments. In this session, we will share findings from our Noyce Track 1 project, where we integrated the use of intentional faculty, formal and informal clinical experiences, and structured reflection activities to interrogate the types of value our Noyce participants derived from their early experiences as undergraduate preservice teachers.
