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Using Designed Instructional Activities to Enable Novices to Manage Ambitious Mathematics Teaching

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Instructional Explanations in the Disciplines

Abstract

If teacher education is to prepare novices to engage successfully in the complex work of ambitious instruction, it must somehow prepare them to teach within the continuity of the challenging moment-by-moment interactions with students and content over time. With Leinhardt, we would argue that teaching novices to do routines that structure teacher–student–content relationships over time to accomplish ambitious goals could both maintain and reduce the complexity of what they need to learn to do to carry out this work successfully. These routines would embody the regular “participation structures” that specify what teachers and students do with one another and with the mathematical content. But teaching routines are not practiced by ambitious teachers in a vacuum and they cannot be learned by novices in a vacuum. In Lampert’s classroom, the use of exchange routines occurred inside of instructional activities with particular mathematical learning goals like successive approximation of the quotient in a long division problem, charting and graphing functions, and drawing arrays to represent multi-digit multiplications. To imagine how instructional activities using exchange routines could be designed as tools for mathematics teacher education, we have drawn on two models from outside of mathematics education. One is a teacher education program for language teachers in Rome and the other is a program that prepares elementary school teachers at the University of Chicago. Both programs use instructional activities built around routines as the focus of a practice-oriented approach to teacher preparation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See for example, Chazan (2000), Herbst (2003), Cobb & McClain (2002), Ball (1993), Heaton (2000), and Schoenfeld (2008).

  2. 2.

    Dilit is an acronym for Di vulgazione L ingua It aliana, which translates as “making the Italian language accessible.”

  3. 3.

    We see Pedagogies of Practice as a cyclic integration of what Grossman et al. (2009) have identified as Pedagogies of Investigation and Pedagogies of Enactment.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Magdalene Lampert, Heather Beasley & Hala Ghousseini

  2. College of Education, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Elham Kazemi

  3. Department of Education, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Megan Franke

Authors
  1. Magdalene Lampert
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  2. Heather Beasley
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  3. Hala Ghousseini
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  4. Elham Kazemi
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  5. Megan Franke
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Correspondence to Magdalene Lampert .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Pittsburgh, O'Hara Street 3939, Pittsburgh, 15213, U.S.A.

    Mary Kay Stein

  2. University of Pittsburgh, S. Bouquet Street 230, Pittsburgh, 15260, U.S.A.

    Linda Kucan

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Lampert, M., Beasley, H., Ghousseini, H., Kazemi, E., Franke, M. (2010). Using Designed Instructional Activities to Enable Novices to Manage Ambitious Mathematics Teaching. In: Stein, M., Kucan, L. (eds) Instructional Explanations in the Disciplines. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0594-9_9

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