Work

Teachers’ Dilemmatic Sensemaking as a Source of Knowledge Making: Explaining to Process and Explaining to Explore

Year: 2025

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: In recent years, there have been calls for teachers to engage in responsive instruction.Simultaneously, teacher education has focused on 'best' practices and routines to support classroom responsiveness.However, responsive instruction is definitionally non-routine, and existing professional development often fails to attend to the complexities of responsive instruction, often expressed as dilemmas.Our project collaborates with a professional development organization aimed at supporting teachers in equitable and ambitious mathematics teaching by facilitating video-based formative feedback (VFF) cycles, centered on teachers' inquiry questions and representations of practice.Looking at VFF cycles of two experienced teachers, we found that both teachers grounded their dilemmatic sensemaking in explanations of tensions they experienced, but subsequent discussions differed.This analysis furthers understanding of teachers' learning through collaborative talk and points to a need to attend to the dilemmatic nature of teaching to support educators developing responsive practice.

Source: Proceedings.

DOI: 10.22318/icls2025.110488

Authors: Karen Underwood, Ilana Horn, Elizabeth Metts, Shuqin Li, Kyle Nolting

Institutions: Vanderbilt University, Hunan Normal University, University of Denver

Language: English

Topic: Mathematics Education and Teaching Techniques

Subfield: Education

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Quality education

Open Access status: bronze

Funder: National Science Foundation