Hi Sandra--

Yes, our focus is on the moves the instructor makes during the class.  It's why we have demarcated teaching math *for* justice as opposed to teaching the math *of* social justice.  By scaffolds, we are wandering about what you and others consider important for people who are just beginning to think about what teaching for justice means and how to do it in their own classrooms.  As you noted, most people who are trying it for the first time will have many questions and concerns.  As such, we are wandering about what  can be done in providing supporting materials that accompany the tasks themselves that could provide guidance for the instructors before they implement the  lesson itself.  The ultimate goal is to eventually have a central repository of tasks with accompanying instructional supports to give people who are new to such ideas and the tasks themselves sufficient guidance so that they are likely to have some success at implementing the tasks in just and equitable ways.  So our central question is what do you think such supports should include and why those particular things?

Hi April--

You can actually see what happened afterward in the extended version of the video at the address below:

https://sfsu.box.com/v/primed-K-8-stem-for-all-2021

Yes, part of the reason we selected the video was this college instructor's use of talk moves that have been well-known in K-12 education for a while. The college math instructor participants in last year's PRIMED short-course shared the challenges they and their students had in being in a college environment (where the norm is instructor-centered and instructor-filtered knowledge sharing). Their reports suggest that one next step for the course may be offering a list of moves with indications of the relative strength of dissonance one might generate by using them and the investment needed to be explicit and prepare students for the new norms one is attempting to establish. Unlike many K-12 settings, the variety in professional environments and job security in post-secondary settings means many instructors who teach math for future elementary school teachers are more vulnerable to challenge (or even non-re-hire) when experimenting with instructional moves. That's why we are seeking ways to scaffold experimentation that are accessible and can be taken up by people, including contingently employed faculty (e.g., hired semester to semester) at community colleges and universities as well as tenured/tenure-track and other full-time folk. 

Hi Helen--

Well it helps to remind ourselves of that since I'm NTT faculty.  However, it's also important because according to recent studies done by Masingila, Olanoff, and others, the NTT faculty make up a significant proportion of the population teaching the courses for future elementary teachers.  We have also seen anecdotal evidence of the (possibly positive and negative) impacts that teaching the courses can have on 2 year institutional faculty as a result of working on the project.

Billy

Hi David,
If I understand correctly, your post asks for techniques used by the instructor in the video that represent accomplishing the goals of justice and equity in instruction. For me that involves answering two questions: one about what I think justice and equity look like and one about how the video shows an instructor "accomplishing" that. On the first question, my take is a combination: "Justice is what love looks like in public" (Cornell West) and equity is a verb (not a noun), it is what one approximates, in a kind of calculus of accumulating moments with (and among) people, curricula, and policies, in the pursuit of liberation.

The professional work of the instructor in the video clip and extended video include many things that current research might identify as "equitable": group activity based in a group-worthy task that can leverage variety in student experience, the instructor modeling and explicitly naming efforts to elicit and celebrate diversity in thinking, opportunities for students to both choose a role and practice a particular (assigned) role in group or whole-class interaction, classroom seating arrangements in which students face each other, shared representations (prior to the clip, students worked at boards around the room and the group productions are visible in the background).

Now, given the door opened by your inquiry, I will elaborate a bit with some of the recent work Natasha Speer and I have been doing. A technique is a way of carrying out a task, it is a method or procedure. As was noted more than 20 years ago by Franke and colleagues (1998),

Self-sustaining, generative change does not involve acquiring a set of procedures to implement with fidelity; rather it frequently entails teachers making changes in their basic epistemological perspectives, their knowledge of what it means to learn, as well as their conceptions of classroom practice. It means conceptualizing teacher change in terms of teachers becoming ongoing learners (p. 67).

Successful implementations of the kinds of instructional practices described as equitable call for teaching that elicits and utilizes student contributions. For novice instructors beginning their careers as college teachers, the expectation is that they facilitate discussions to which students contribute their thinking and voices. This kind of instructional decentering is, at its most basic, the act of seeing from someone else’s point of view and has historical roots in the work of Piaget (1955). It means engaging with other people as a participant in interaction. A participant with power. That means learning to invite and orchestrate yet not dominate interaction.

In decentering, instructional attention is on uncovering, understanding, and expanding on what students know and do to include novel, non-standard, and standard mathematical ideas and methods (Carlson et al., 2007; Rahman, 2018; Teuscher et al., 2016). Being self-aware and facilitating self-aware learning by students are the focus (instead of attention and authority being vested largely or solely in the instructor).

Decentering requires attention to other people as (potentially) different from oneself, noticing nuances in similarity and difference between one’s own perspectives or experiences and those of others. In its most developed forms, instruction that leverages decentering also bridges across similarities and differences in formulating in-the-moment responses to situations.

Decentering depends on a variety of individual instructor factors (e.g., self-knowledge, goals, orientations, beliefs, psycho-social challenges). Professional development can provide opportunities for instructors to build skill in decentering, along with other facets of cross- or intercultural competence. There is a developmental continuum for decentering: from an ethno-centric view that everyone is like me to an ethno-relative view, that any person (including me) is like and unlike every other person in identifiable and valuable ways (Bennett, 2004).

In particular, learners in instructor-decentered instruction are (and are encouraged to see themselves as) decision-makers in the classroom. Novice instructors need to learn how to initiate, sustain, and manage undergraduates as participants in student-centered learning. This includes instructors learning about many things from a student-centered perspective, such as content, curriculum, and assessment (Bok, 2009), communication and interaction (e.g., related to classroom authority or socio-political factors, Gutiérrez, 2009, 2013; Winter & Yackel, 2000), as well as how to learn in and from instruction itself (Speer & Hald, 2008). Learning to elicit student thinking and learning how to shape instruction based on that thinking is the foundation on which generative change is built (Franke et al., 1998).

Thanks Shandy for the wonderful and thoughtful response.  I think you are spot on that "individual instructor factors" are a significant component of the change along with a healthy does of reflection and meta-cognitive work. Very helpful in thinking about the your work and the lesson.   

Hi Jonee,

Though we did not use this new activity in the last offer of the short-course, we have piloted it with a dozen novice college math instructors. Generally there are two types of answers. Either respondents have a script in which the instructor elicits one or two more student responses that are also metaphorical (rather than using standard mathematical discourse) or there is a student who responds "correctly" with standard mathematical discourse. In all cases, novice instructors who have engaged with this task so far have framed it in terms of whether the students "do what he [the instructor] wants" and include the aim that the "correct answer" is spoken by the instructor. None have predicted what actually happened, and few have included moving on from graph F and seeking (as the instructor foreshadowed) alternative arguments in favor of the other graphs. 

We think the main value in the activity is raising awareness of alternatives -- ways in which classroom power can be managed as a conductor of an incredibly talented orchestra (rather than as a soloist -- to get metaphorical :). For so many novice college instructors, how to attempt equitable instruction is mythical -- it has never been witnessed. The activity allows a glimpse of one attempt at it. Other activities in the short-course (some also with video clips) illustrate other attempts.