Productive Disciplinary Engagement as a Framework to Support Mathematics Teacher Leaders

ABSTRACT

A critical aspect of Mathematics Teacher Leaders’ (MTLs) multi-faceted work is facilitating collective disciplinary discussions relevant and accessible for teachers. While research has identified goals for teacher learning, how MTLs learn to support these goals in content-specific ways is still under investigation. In this study, we lift the classroom design and analytic framework of Productive Disciplinary Engagement to examine the work of 73 MTLs and two expert facilitators in a professional development setting. Our use of the framework as an analytic lens to examine leader professional development revealed critical MTL and facilitator practices that supported productive mathematical engagement and practices that hindered engagement. We contend that productive disciplinary engagement provides a fruitful lens as an analytic framework for research. We also argue that it may serve as a valuable design framework for MTL and teacher professional development in future research and development efforts.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher-leader
• professional development
• productive disciplinary engagement

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank colleagues on the RMLL team for their support of this work. We thank the helpful reviews of the editors and the anonymous reviewers. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (ESI 0554186). The ideas in this manuscript are of the authors and do not reflect those of the NSF. Study IRB, OSU 3373.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Rehearsal here is not meant to denote the enactment of a particular instructional routine as discussed in teacher preparation (e.g., Lampert et al., 2013). Instead, we use the term rehearsal (or rehearse) to describe instances in which participants were encouraged to narrate, recount, or extend their own thinking or the reasoning of others. In accord with the definition, we saw these opportunities for MTLs to “try out” new language and articulate reasoning as “practice” for their future work facilitating teacher learning.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the NSF [ESI 0554186].