Eric.ed.gov – Supporting Beginning Teachers to Engage in Relational Investigations of Teaching and Learning

This paper examines a social design-based approach to supporting beginning elementary school teachers toward ambitious and equitable mathematics teaching. First-year teachers were enlisted as co-designers of a learning community aimed at supporting participants to build classroom math communities that leverage students’ diverse mathematical resources. Findings show that teachers collectively moved from thinking about teaching as fixing local problems to engaging in relational investigations of teaching and learning that centered students’ mathematical experiences. This shift supported teachers to take up and make progress toward complex problems of practice in their classroom teaching. This study has implications for how we conceptualize, analyze, and design for equity-oriented learning for beginning teachers. [For the complete proceedings, see ED606556.]