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High school mathematics teachers' noticing of inequitable talk

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Abstract

To make instructional decisions that interrupt inequitable talk in the classroom, teachers must notice it in the first place. In a two-year Professional Learning Experience (PLE) focused on the core practice of facilitating equitable discussions, we found that two different groups of math teachers took up the work of noticing for equity in different ways and with varying degrees of success. We analyzed teachers’ written goals for teaching, videos of their in-person classroom instruction, video recordings of their coaching sessions, and sets of video annotations. Our findings indicate that teachers who noticed for equity: (1) engaged in conversations about status and identity (2) had more student-centered goals, and (3) were more likely to select “bumpy moments” of their instruction to discuss in coaching sessions. These findings have implications for instructional coaches, teacher educators, and professional learning facilitators interested in supporting teachers with noticing inequitable talk in their classrooms.

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Notes

  1. For the purposes of this study, the terms “male” and “female” refer to any student or teacher who self-identified as such. We recognize that these are imperfect terms that present gender as binaries, yet we use these terms throughout the paper because participants used them.

  2. All names are pseudonyms.

  3. The term “low income” is used by the program, but we want to acknowledge that any terminology regarding socio-economic status is fraught. In general, these teachers teach at Title 1 schools with an average of 80% of the student families qualifying for free or reduced-fee lunch.

  4. This discrepancy might be due to the fact that the teachers had a more nuanced understanding of their instructional context and students than the researchers did, affording them greater insights.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, 485 Lasuen Mall Office B10, Stanford, CA, 94305-6104, USA

    Jessica Lee Stovall, Daniel R. Pimentel, Janet Carlson & Sarah R. Levine

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  1. Jessica Lee Stovall
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  2. Daniel R. Pimentel
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Stovall, J.L., Pimentel, D.R., Carlson, J. et al. High school mathematics teachers' noticing of inequitable talk. J Math Teacher Educ (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10857-023-09572-9

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