tandfonline.com – Fifty ways to work with students’ diverse abilities? A video study on inclusive teaching practices in secondary mathematics classrooms

ABSTRACT

Inclusive teaching practices can be characterized as recurrent ways how teachers work with their students’ diverse abilities, but how exactly are they enacted in subject matter classrooms? The paper proposes a conceptual framework to unpack inclusive practices according to the student ability to which they refer, in five typical jobs for teachers: (a) identifying the demands for the ability, (b) differentiating learning goals, (c) compensating for low abilities, (d) enhancing abilities, and (e) addressing the abilities in joint learning. The proposed job-ability framework for inclusive teaching practices is substantiated in a video study of 25 mathematics lessons on percentages with the same curriculum material. In total, rather than 50, 133 different inclusive teaching practices were identified in 3862 sequences and structured into 20 cells. They address four abilities (from most often to least often): (1) selective attention/working memory, (2) mathematical pre-knowledge, (3) language proficiency, and (4) metacognitive regulation. The large variance of enacted practices identified within and between lessons calls for professional development that elicits, leverages, and extends the repertoire of practices. While the reported frequencies are specific to the chosen teaching unit, the job-ability framework can be transferred to other subject-matter classrooms and used in professional development programs.