CRME Publications

Justification as a learning practice: Its purposes in middle grades mathematics classrooms.

Megan Staples et al. — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 18:28:34 PST

Justification is a core mathematics practice. Although its role in the mathematician community has been studied extensively (e.g., Hanna, 2000), we know relatively little about its role in K-12 classrooms. This study was conducted to clarify aspects of justification as a learning practice in middle grades mathematics classrooms. We document the views of 12 middle grades teachers who were working actively to incorporate justification into their classrooms. We further analyze differences between teachers’ purposes and mathematician purposes, and how these differences may reflect the different purposes of the two communities. Implications for mathematics education and teacher development are discussed.

Promoting Student Collaboration in a Detracked, Heterogeneous Secondary Mathematics Classroom

Megan Staples — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 08:10:29 PDT

Detracking and heterogeneous groupwork are two educational practices that have been shown to have promise for affording all students needed learning opportunities to develop mathematical proficiency. However, teachers face significant pedagogical challenges in organizing productive groupwork in these settings. This study offers an analysis of one teacher’s role in creating a classroom system that supported student collaboration within groups in a detracked, heterogeneous geometry classroom. The analysis focuses on four categories of the teacher’s work that created a set of affordances to support within group collaborative practices and links the teacher’s work with principles of complex systems.

Supporting Whole-Class Collaborative Inquiry in a Secondary Mathematics Classroom

Megan Staples — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 11:18:02 PST

Recent mathematics education reform efforts call for the instantiation of mathematics classroom environments where students have opportunities to reason and construct their understandings as part of a community of learners. Despite some successes, traditional models of instruction still dominate the educational landscape. This limited success can be attributed, in part, to an underdeveloped understanding of the roles teachers must enact to successfully organize and participate in collaborative classroom practices. Towards this end, an in-depth longitudinal case study of a collaborative high school mathematics classroom was undertaken guided by the following two questions: What roles do these collaborative practices require of teacher and students? How does the community’s capacity to engage in collaborative practices develop over time? The analyses produced two conceptual models: one of the teacher’s role, along with specific instructional strategies the teacher used to organize a collaborative learning environment, and the second of the process by which the class’s capacity to participate in collaborative inquiry practices developed over time.