Upcoming Presentations

Janine Remillard will be presenting along with Hendrik Van Steenbrugge and Tomas Bergqvist at the International Conference on Mathematics Textbooks in Southampton, England, July 29-31.

You can find the paper on the dissemination page.

NCTM Research Conference

ICUBiT team members made two Presentations at the NCTM Research Conference

Teacher Fidelity Decisions and Their Impact on Lesson Enactment

Ok-Kyeong Kim and Napthalin Atanga

This study examined fidelity decisions (FDs)—teachers’ decisions on whether to use, modify, or omit each of the resources provided in the curriculum, or to add a new element to enact lessons—and their impact on lesson enactment within and across tasks and lessons. We particularly examined whether various FDs help teachers steer instruction to meet the mathematical goals of the lessons and whether they promote high cognitive demand. The findings of the study reveal teacher capacities that are needed to make appropriate FDs to transform the written to enacted lessons productively, which include recognizing important mathematical points and addressing them in instruction, and noticing and bridging gaps in the resources provided by the written lessons. Also, it is important for curriculum designers to make the goals and intentions of tasks, activities, and lessons as transparent as possible to teachers. Simply listing goals at the beginning of the lesson does not seem sufficient.

Design Arcs and In-the-Moment Design Decisions

Joshua Taton and Janine Remillard

In this presentation, we describe a method for analyzing the relationships between the enacted curriculum, the teacher's-intended curriculum, and the instructional materials. We begin by looking at subsets of instructional sequences in the enacted lesson, identifying the mathematical purpose of each given sequence. We then construct a visual representation--what we call a "lesson map"--that shows how the sequences play out in the classroom and upon what resources the teacher appears to draw in enacting the lesson. Lessons are comprised of a series of design arcs on our lesson map. We theorize that teachers need to call upon a set of resources, solve a particular pedagogical problem, and work with students in steering toward the mathematical purpose; the decisions made by a teacher in deploying resources and using steering moves are "in-the-moment design decisions" (IMDDs). We believe that our evolving method of analyzing the enacted lesson is useful for several reasons: it allows us to view the lesson on two different scales, simultaneously (big-picture and close-up). Our future work will involve looking across teachers and across curricula, to identify broad patterns, as well as investigating how individual IMDDs contribute to the overall effectiveness of lessons and/or opportunities to learn.