Assessing Teachers’ Developing Interpretive Power: Analysing Student Thinking

Abstract

A cohort of middle school mathematics teachers in the U.S. participated in a two-year professional development program that focused on developing a deeper conceptual understanding of the mathematics of middle school with connections to instructional practice. We assessed the teachers’ developing interpretive power, specifically developing interpretations of student work, which Ball and Cohen (1999) call one of the core activities of teaching. In interviews before and after the first year of the program, we found significant shifts in their capability in anticipating student responses to a task and in the range of pedagogical moves. On further analysis, these shifts were related to positioning – position of a teacher relative to the students (role of the teacher), perception of the position with regards to mathematics (primacy of formal solutions in mathematical understanding) and positioning of students in relation to each other (as pedagogical resources). Here we draw upon four teachers’ responses to a situation-specific task in interviews prior to and following a year of professional development and teaching that typify the shifts teachers made in the dimensions of interpretive power.