Jessica Jensen , Marina Halter , Anna Kye

DOI: Vol.23(No.2) 63-92, 2020

Student engagement in high-level, cognitively demanding instruction is pivotal for student learning. However, many teachers are unable to maintain such instruction, especially in instances of non-responsive students. This case study of three middle school teachers explores prompts that aim to move classroom discussions past student silence. Prompt sequences were categorized into Progressing, Focusing, and Redirecting Actions, and then analyzed for maintenance of high levels of cognitive demand. Results indicate that specific prompt types are prone to either raise or diminish the cognitive demand of a discussion. While Focusing Actions afforded students opportunities to process information on a more meaningful level, Progressing Actions typically lowered cognitive demand in an effort to get through mathematics content or a specific method or procedure. Prompts that raise cognitive demand typically start out as procedural or concrete and progress to include students’ thoughts or ideas about mathematical concepts. This study aims to discuss five specific implications on how teachers can use prompting techniques to effectively maintain cognitively challenging discourse through moments of student silence.

questioning, silence, cognitive demand, discourse prompting

Sunghwan Hwang , Eunhye Cho , Lillie R. Albert

DOI: Vol.23(No.2) 93-111, 2020

The purpose of this study was to examine mathematics teachers’ perceptions of multicultural education. To achieve this goal, the study explored how 10 elementary mathematics teachers noticed multicultural content in a mathematics textbook. Building upon noticing framework (Jacobs, Lamb, & Philipp, 2010), we first examined teachers’ attention toward multicultural content in a mathematics textbook. Then, we examined teachers’ interpretation of the content. We employed a content analysis approach to examine the collected data. The results indicated that most mathematics teachers held a content integration perspective. Their view was that “multicultural education” referred to learning about the diverse cultures of different countries. Moreover, although they noticed some multicultural content in the textbook, they wanted to discuss them in superficially descriptive ways and avoid talking about social justice issues. Additionally, some teachers believed that mathematics is a culture-free subject. They argued that multicultural content should not be presented in mathematics textbooks. We also discussed uncommon themes, which were reported by only a few mathematics teachers.

teacher noticing, multicultural education, elementary mathematics textbook

Amanda Meiners , Kyong Mi Choi , Dae Hong

DOI: Vol.23(No.2) 113-133, 2020

Pre-service teachers (PST)are students who are developing theirmindset,persistence, instructional practices, and perception of tasks from two perspectives: as currentstudents and as future teachers.As part of a larger study with PSTs engaged in a mindset intervention, this study quantitatively investigated PSTs mindset and persistence. During professional development (PD), PSTs engaged in multiple strategies (MS)tasks that promoted changes to PSTs mindset and persistence.PSTs’ mindset pre-and post-PD were categorized after attending at least 4 interventionsas fixed, mixed, or growth using the theory of intelligence, and their persistence as high or low using the Grit-S.Changes in categorization were noticed and explored for reasons of what could be done to make mindset interventions more effective such as consistently using challenging mathematics tasks with more open ended answers and focusing on discussion based mathematical lessons.

mindset, persistence, multiple strategies, pre-service teachers, intervention