Hiccups within technology mediated lessons: a catalyst for mathematics teachers’ epistemological development

Abstract

The notion of the lesson ‘hiccup’, defined as the perturbation experienced by a teacher during teaching that has been triggered by the use of mathematical technology, was first proposed in Clark-Wilson. Hiccups which are both unanticipated and unplanned, emerged from a study that sought to make sense of the process of secondary mathematics teachers’ situated learning as they began to use a particular new technological tool (TI-Nspire™ handheld devices and software) in their classrooms. The high frequency of the resulting hiccups enabled a categorisation of seven hiccup types that were shown to have influenced the development of teachers’ mathematical, pedagogic and technological knowledge. This article first reports and then extends this earlier work by articulating the design principles for a professional development approach within the Cornerstone Maths (CM) project that uses hiccups to try to address professional development ‘at scale’ concerning student use of dynamic digital technologies in mathematics classrooms.

Keywords:

• mathematics teacher knowledge
• hiccup
• dynamic technology

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Corrigendum

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Each lesson activity might include all or some of: a formal lesson plan, the teacher’s hand-written personal notes; a lesson structure for use in the classroom (for example a Smart NoteBook or PowerPoint file); a software file developed by the teacher for use by the teacher (to introduce the activity or demonstrate an aspect of the activity); a software file developed by the teacher for use by the students that would normally need to be transferred to the students handhelds on advance of the lesson; a task or instruction sheet developed by the teacher for students’ use; students’ written work resulting from the activity; and students’ software files captured during and/or at the end of the activity.

2. The online project community was facilitated by the government funded National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics portal www.ncetm.org.uk.

3. At the end of the 2013–2014 academic year, 111 of the project teachers had completed the survey.

Additional information

Funding

The data collection carried out during the TI-Nspire Research Evaluation project was funded by Texas Instruments as part of two phases of research, subsequently reported in Clark-Wilson (2008, 2009). The Cornerstone Maths project is funded by the Li Ka Shing Foundation and it is an intensive collaboration between teams at the London Knowledge Lab and at the Center for Technology in Learning, SRI International, Menlo Park, USA.