The mathematics education community faces an intimidating challenge: how to increase and improve mathematics learning in diverse, urban high schools.  Broadly, this challenge involves two key issues in mathematics education.  The first issue is equity, which deals with the fairness of access to learning in mathematics classrooms.  A second issue is teacher learning, which involves the processes by which teachers develop the knowledge, skills, and understandings to run mathematics classrooms in which a range of learners build their mathematical competencies.  An overarching question is how to bring the latter to bear on the former; that is, how to help mathematics teachers learn to improve the equity of mathematics classrooms.  Part of the challenge is the ill-defined nature of equity as it is realized in classrooms.  As Gutiérrez (2007) argued, “because equity is a value-laden term and requires human judgment, we have had fewer examples of what equity might mean empirically.  That is, how might we know it if we saw it?” (p. 38).  Many mathematics teachers lack a thorough vision of what equity looks like in the observable activities of a classroom and do not have an actionable set of tools to identify and treat inequities.  My session explores one approach to these issues: how mathematics teachers learn to notice issues of equitable participation in their classrooms through the use of video clubs—regular gatherings of teachers to watch, discuss and analyze video from their classrooms (Sherin & van Es, 2009). 

I take a situative perspective on teacher learning (Putnam & Borko, 2000), examining how, as a community, video club participants noticed equitable participation.  Drawing on the work of Sherin and van Es (Sherin & van Es, 2009) on video clubs, I conceptualize the construct of teachers’ noticing as having two components: (a) selective attention to classroom events and features and (b) knowledge-based reasoning about those events and features.  The relevant knowledge base for my study is teachers’ knowledge of complex instruction (Cohen & Lotan, 1997; Boaler & Staples, 2008) and its desired ends in mathematics classrooms—equitable participation and students’ mathematical understanding.  I define participation as students’ interaction with content and students’ interaction with other students around content.  This participation falls on a continuum of equity depending on criteria from Cohen and Lotan’s (1997) concept of equitable classrooms.  Additionally, video club participants may notice equitable participation by attending to complex instruction strategies that teacher make and interpreting them as having influence on students’ participation.

The focal video club operated within a partnership of a university and an urban school district, primarily drawing participants from three high schools with ethnically and socioeconomically diverse student populations.  The video club was situated within a larger program of professional learning that aimed to “re-culture” mathematics departments so that instruction shifted away from traditional pedagogies and toward pedagogies that encouraged broader participation, such as complex instruction.  I collected data from two sources: public notes taken during video club sessions and interviews with a representative sample of video club participants.  I analyzed the data using open coding methods.

Analysis of the video club notes reveals that participants attended to how classroom norms were reified by student interactions and shaped by teacher actions.  These noticed events are noteworthy because teachers interpreted them in terms of their implications for equitable participation, indicating that classroom equity was a concern that guided their perception of classrooms.  Additionally, participants attended to aspects of teachers’ questioning such as body positioning and the questions’ addressee(s) that were interpreted to be consequential for equity of participation within small groups and full class discussions. Participant interviews reveal that participants found four features of the video club to be particularly helpful in establishing a productive learning environment: relevance, intellectual safety, pedagogical focus, and multiple perspectives. Mention of race and culture were notably absent from the video club discussions and the interviews, suggesting an avenue for future investigation.

Although more work is needed to assess the influence of video club on teachers’ classroom practice (Sherin & van Es, 2009), the overall findings suggest that video club may act as a powerful setting for teachers to develop awareness of classroom-level equity (and inequity) and the effects that teaching practice may have on such characteristics.

Professional learning, a priority area for this year’s presession, is a core element of my presentation.  I document a video club, which is a promising avenue for practicing teachers to learn to notice particular features of classrooms.  Sherin and van Es (Sherin & van Es, 2009) have studied mathematics teachers’ learning in video clubs extensively.  My own research contributes to this body of knowledge by investigating (a) equitable participation as a target of noticing and (b) significantly different implementation of video clubs.  The evidence presented will be of interest to researchers and teacher educators, particularly those interested in the development of noticing skills.

My session will run according to the following timeline.  First, I will introduce the relevant theoretical frameworks—teachers’ noticing and equitable participation—and then will share how the video club operated, perhaps showing an excerpt of video and eliciting the audience’s ideas around what aspects of equity are observable in the clip.  Afterward I will share how my participants reacted to the same clips in particular and to the video club sessions more generally.  Another option for involving the audience is to elicit different approaches to instilling teachers with sensitivity to and self-efficacy for equity promotion within their own classrooms.

References

Boaler, J. & Staples, M.  (2008).  Creating mathematical futures through an equitable teaching approach: The case of Railside School.  Teachers College Record, 110(3), 608-645.

Cohen, E.G. & Lotan, R.A.  (1997).  Working for equity in heterogeneous classrooms.  New York: Teachers College Press.

Gutiérrez, R. (2007). (Re)defining equity: The importance of a critical perspective. In N. Nasir & P. Cobb (Eds). Improving access to mathematics: Diversity and equity in the classroom (pp. 37-50). New York: Teachers College Press.

Sherin, M.G. & van Es, E.A. (2009). Effects of video club participation on teachers’ professional vision. Journal of Teacher Education, 60(1), 20-37.