Collaborative Research: Advancing Mentor Teachers' Practices through Collaborative Pedagogical Reasoning

This project aims to enhance the quality of elementary mathematics teaching by supporting mentor teachers to better prepare the next generation of novice teachers to engage in responsive mathematics teaching. This design-based intervention study is based on several hypotheses about how mentor teachers might play a stronger role in supporting novices to develop these practices in K-8 classrooms. Specifically, the researchers hypothesize that if mentor teachers make their pedagogical reasoning visible to novices through engagement in collaborative pedagogical reasoning (Co-PR), then novice teachers will learn about the invisible decision-making that skilled teachers engage in as they carry out responsive mathematics teaching. Further, they hypothesize that mentor teachers can be supported to engage in Co-PR through the design of learning opportunities that afford joint inquiry with others and are mediated with shared tools, designed to guide both disciplinary and equitable aspects of responsive teaching. Using an inquiry group professional development structure at three strategic sites, the researchers aim to build mentoring tools and structured opportunities that support mentor teachers to make visible the layers of their decision making and to facilitate Co-PR with novices before, during, and after teaching. The project team will study the development of mentor and novice teachers’ Co-PR, exploring growth in their pedagogical reasoning and factors that contribute to this development. They will also investigate how the enactment of Co-PR differs across teacher education types and programs. Findings will contribute to scholarly insights about mentor and novice teacher development and will generate a set of mentoring tools useful to the fields of mathematics education and teacher education.

Lead Organization: UW-Madison

Partner Organizations:Boston University and University of Pennsylvania

https://cadrek12.org/projects/advancing-mentor-teachers-practices-through-collaborative-pedagogical-reasoning