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Principal Investigators: Beth Herbel-Eisenmann, Michael Steele and Michelle Cirillo (University of Delaware)
Current Graduate Students: Heather Bosman, Lorraine Males, Faith Muirhead, Sam Otten, Shannon Sweeney
Funding: National Science Foundation
Dates: 2009-2014
The purpose of the proposed project is to develop, design, and test innovative materials to assist professional development leaders to support secondary mathematics teachers in negotiating classroom norms that promote productive discourse practices. More specifically, the materials will help professional development leaders: a) increase mathematics teachers’ understanding of classroom discourse and its relationship to supporting student learning; b) raise teachers’ awareness of the discourse patterns at work in their own classrooms; c) assist secondary mathematics teachers in identifying discourse patterns that could be used more purposefully to support student learning; and d) support teachers in more purposefully negotiating classroom discourse patterns that can help students develop increasingly complex discourse practices involving high-level mathematical explanation, justification, and argumentation. The M-DISC instructional materials that will be developed and tested will center on narrative and video cases of teaching, in which teachers and students are observed engaging in these discourse practices, making the practices and their impact on student learning an object of inquiry for teacher learning. The materials will be comprised of an introductory module, 5 constellations of activities each built around a case, and a module to help professional developers support secondary mathematics teachers to do action research on their discourse practices. Each constellation (set of activities anchored around the five “talk moves” described by Chapin et al., 2003) will consist of professional learning tasks that engage teachers in: solving mathematical tasks of high cognitive demand featured in the case; analyzing the case with respect to the five talk moves and the ways in which the talk moves supported the learning of mathematics; reading and discussing relevant literature on classroom discourse; analyzing student work; and field-based assignments of small and large scale. Participating teachers will design action research cycles as a capstone in order to study their evolving discourse patterns and the impact of those changes on student learning.
The intellectual merit of the proposed M-DISC project lies in the creation of new materials that have the potential to help teachers develop new understandings of classroom discourse. Although we know that inquiry-based discourse practices are beneficial for student learning, mathematics teachers continue to engage students in forms of discourse that focus on the transmission of information because they have not learned about, considered, or been exposed to alternative interaction patterns. Hence, the M-DISC materials will assist professional developers in working with secondary mathematics teachers on alternative discourse patterns with the goal of helping them promote productive classroom discourse. The PIs of this project bring extensive experience in analyzing mathematics classroom discourse, doing PD with secondary teachers related to math classroom discourse, and developing PD materials.
The M-DISC project has the potential to have a broad impact on mathematics education because unless teachers become more purposeful about their classroom discourse, they will continue to undermine some of the intended goals they have for their students. By drawing on a range of expertise in the Advisory Board, we will develop and test the materials that will incorporate specific attention to mathematics and assistance for teachers teaching students for whom English is a second language, thereby broadening the participation of students in mathematics. Dissemination will take place at professional conferences and through university websites and communications offices (e.g., marketing materials that will be distributed widely).
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