Characterizing a highly-accomplished teacher’s instructional actions in response to students’ mathematical thinking

Abstract

This paper is part of a larger study which investigates how a highly-accomplished teacher and two beginning teachers notice student thinking and respond to stu- dents’ mathematical thinking as they teach concepts of multiplication and division in a third-grade classroom. The focus of this paper is on describing highly-accom- plished teacher’s instructional actions in response to student thinking which are different than that of the beginning teachers. The participant teachers’ instruc- tional actions were analysed utilizing a framework de- veloped by Cengiz, Kline and Grant (2011). The results revealed that the highly-accomplished teacher chal- lenged student thinking with counter arguments and introduced alternative representations more frequently, but complimented students less frequently than the be- ginning teachers.