Learning with routines: Preservice teachers learning to lead classroom mathematics discussions.

The emphasis on reasoning and discourse in mathematics education makes it a necessity to prepare preservice teachers to conduct productive mathematical discussions---no easy task given the complexity of this aspect of ambitious mathematics teaching and its unfamiliarity to many prospective teachers. In this dissertation, the author addresses the question of how pre-service teachers can be prepared to lead productive classroom mathematics discussions, assuming that they need tools to reduce some uncertainties in practice while learning to teach mathematics in intellectually responsible and responsive ways. Shc argues that the use of such tools can harness some of the complexity in practice and enable prospective teachers to attend to core tasks of teaching. The author examines the opportunities to learn about leading classroom mathematics discussions made available in the context of a secondary mathematics methods course intervention that used discourse routines to develop pre-service teachers' knowledge about leading productive mathematics discussions. She also examines how five pre-service teachers, who attended the methods course, used the discourse routines in the context of their student teaching. Using interpretive case study methodology and conversation analysis methods, the author examines the pre-service teachers' approaches to leading classroom mathematics discussions using discourse routines as embedded in an activity system comprising the community of the classroom and its prevalent social conventions. The analysis draws on data collected from classroom observations, interviews, lesson plans, and teaching reflections. Case studies are developed based on the kind of discourse patterns emerging from the analyses and the levels of appropriation of the discourse routines by the preservice teachers. Through cross-case analysis, the author finds that the pre-service teachers were able to appropriate the discourse routines at two levels: surface-level and conceptual. She finds that the pre-service teachers who appropriated the discourse routines at a surface-level promoted a contributive pattern of classroom discourse, while the one who appropriated them at a conceptual level promoted a reflective pattern of discourse. The author also examines some factors in the activity system that shaped the pre-service teachers' practice in leading classroom mathematics discussions and their levels of appropriation of the routines. Based on these findings, she discusses potential implications for the use and design of disciplined, purposeful instructional routines in professional education to scaffold the preparation of pre-service teachers for ambitious teaching.Ph.D.Curriculum developmentEducationMathematics educationTeacher educationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/127014/2/3304970.pd