RiSE Colloquium – October 5 – Justin Dimmel

Maine Center for Research in STEM Education (RiSE Center)
Colloquia & Seminar Series

PRESENTS

Justin Dimmel
Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education and Instructional Technology
University of Maine

Exploring the paradox of change without difference: An investigation of teacher’s attitudes toward instruction that departs from the routine when doing proofs in geometry

For as long as mathematics has been taught in US public schools, there have been initiatives that have attempted to improve the quality of mathematics teaching in classrooms. A fundamental challenge for such initiatives is the paradox of change without difference: reform efforts that, in principle, could bring about fundamental shifts in classrooms emerge, in practice, as “shadows of their original intent” (Woodbury & Gess-Newsome, 2002, p. 763). One reason for this paradox is that the patterns of classroom interaction that practicing teachers have honed through years of experience are robust. Initiatives that aim to effect change in the way that mathematics is taught thus need to contend with the realities of the already established practice of mathematics teachers (Cobb, Zhao, & Dean, 2009). To understand how reform efforts might contend with such realities we need to raise a natural question: When teachers encounter reasonable departures from routine instruction, how do they relate to such actions?
To answer this question, we conducted a study that used multimedia surveys to investigate secondary mathematics teachers’ reactions to storyboards that represented episodes of instruction. We found that, when presented with storyboard representations of reasonable departures from what we hypothesized to be routine instruction, participants provided open responses that contained more negative than positive linguistic markers of attitude. At the same time, when participants were shown storyboards that represented what routinely happens in classrooms, positive and negative markers of attitude occurred with equal frequency. I report on the design of the study, the results of the analysis of teachers’ attitudes, and discuss the implications of this work.

Short Bio: Justin Dimmel is assistant professor of Mathematics Education and Instructional Technology at the University of Maine. He earned his Ph. D. in mathematics education at the University of Michigan. His talk today is based on his dissertation, which was a mixed-methods study of the communication practices that are used by teachers and students when doing proofs in high school geometry. Prior to earning his Ph. D., Justin worked for 5 years as a high school mathematics teacher at adventure-based boarding schools in New England and the Bahamas. He has broad interests in how people learn to represent mathematics and communicate their mathematical ideas to others.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2015
3:00-4:00 PM
ARTHUR ST. JOHN HILL AUDITORIUM, 165 BARROWS HALL