Teacher Education Course
EDUC 411: Teaching Children Mathematics
(Syllabus from Fall 2019 available here)
This course is focused on learning to teach mathematics to elementary and middle school students. The central goal is for interns to learn to teach mathematics in ways that are responsible to the goals of the curriculum, responsive to children’s resources and identities, and imaginative and resourceful about the domain we call “mathematics.”
The coursework involves decomposing what is involved in each of the high-leverage practices (HLPs) that are in focus in the course so that interns can see the specific elements of doing them well. The course features examples of the HLPs, representing them through the use of video and through modeling in class. The interns approximate carrying out parts of these practices, using rehearsals, which are structured ways of trying out particular moves or approaches and getting close feedback.
The course also includes work on knowing mathematics in the specialized ways needed in teaching. In preparing to teach, the interns shape the mathematical goals of activities, anticipate the varied ways students might respond, and prepare mathematically for what might happen as a lesson unfolds. They prepare good questions to ask. They generate easier as well as harder versions of problems, either as back-up plans or as ways to focus or extend students’ work. The interns develop a keen sense of the complexity of particular mathematical ideas, and ways they can be scaffolded for students’ learning.
This course focuses in particular on place value and operations with whole numbers and decimals, which are central topics in the K-8 curriculum, and the way they are taught can either help students succeed or hold them up. It also deals with concepts in number theory and includes some work on classification and logic. The course unpacks mathematical practices that matter for using and thinking with math. These include things such as making sense of what problems are asking, persevering with challenging work, building and critiquing mathematical arguments, using language with care, and noticing and using mathematical structure.
Graduate Courses
EDUC 649: Foundational Perspectives on Education Reform
(Syllabus from Fall 2018 available here)
This course seeks to peel back the cover of education reform efforts to understand the underlying assumptions and theories of action, and to analyze both the intended and unintended effects of various policies, interventions, and innovations. Centered in U.S. education practice and policy, the course considers how specific policies and practices work and, consequently, who benefits and who loses. Specifically, the course’s analyses and explorations probe patterns of marginalization and exclusion that are at times explicitly oppressive and at other times underlying apparently laudable practices and policies.
Three sets of questions structure the work of the course:
What has been the history of reform in U.S. education? What problems have reformers tried to solve, for whom? Who has framed the problems—and the arguments that particular reforms could solve those problems? Whose interests have been served by various reforms and whose have not? What meaning is carried by the notion of “reform”? Who have been the actors and agents? When and how have non-dominant communities shaped development and improvement efforts in their own visions and with their own strategies?
What is involved in “implementing” reforms (or changes) in educational practice? How does the design of a reform interact with its enactment in particular cases and in particular environments?
What outcomes have resulted from particular reform efforts, and what explanations are there for these outcomes? What patterns are there in the discourse around reforms and their intended and unintended effects? Whose perspectives and what evidence or data shape the narratives around particular reforms? Whose perspectives and what evidence are missing?
EDUC 737: Content Knowledge for Teaching: Histories, Perspectives, and Methods
(Syllabus from Winter 2019 available here)
This course examines the idea of “knowledge of content” in and for teaching—i.e., helping others to know and make knowledge—and the ways in which it has been conceptualized and used over time, in different subjects and contexts, and by whom. The course investigates the consequences of these conceptualizations for different groups, in and through policy, research, and practice, and how these interact with broader struggles for democracy and justice through public education. It looks at specific efforts to assess content knowledge, evaluate classroom practice, prepare teachers, and study teaching and learning.
Three sets of questions guide the work of the course:
What is the nature of teaching practice and what are its content-understanding demands? How does “knowledge” of a domain figure in helping others learn that domain? How do issues of equity and justice figure in these questions?
What have been different arguments over time for the importance (or not) of professional understanding of content and what has been meant by “knowledge”? Who has made different sorts of arguments, and how have they made them, and why? How have these interacted with patterns of marginalization and dominance in schools?
What are different ways of naming and attending to—including measuring and assessing—content knowledge for teaching? How do particular ways of identifying “content knowledge” for teaching interact with the reproduction or disruption of patterns of marginalization and inequity in schools?
EDUC 772: Policy Contexts of Teaching and Teacher Education
(Syllabus from Winter 2017 available here)
This course investigates and considers the relations of policy and practice with respect to teaching and teacher education. It seeks to understand not only these relations as they are, but also how they have come to be and what they could be. To do so, the course uses an historical perspective to take stock of the current fragmented environment in which U.S. education takes place, and the highly individualized and local nature of practice.
Three questions frame the work of the course:
How might we prepare skillful beginning teachers and support responsible beginning teaching?
How might we build and sustain a high-quality diverse teaching force?
How might policies be designed to support building and sustaining a skillful diverse teaching force?
In order to orient the work on these three questions, the course begins by considering two foundational issues:
What is the “work of teaching”?
What is the work of preparing teachers?
The course also considers how aspects of the past have shaped the present context and probes notions of “quality” carefully to consider different ways in which this term is used in the education field and in the policy environment. To do this, the course delves seriously into why diversity is fundamental to quality in teaching, and closely investigates what is entailed in the effort to build a diverse high-quality teaching force.
EDUC 780: Research on Teaching
(Syllabus from Winter 2018 available here)
Claims about the practice of teaching and teachers are made and justified in a wide variety of ways. Observers pay attention to different aspects of teaching, use different sources and kinds of information and experience, blend insight and interpretation with beliefs and values. What they know may appear from another perspective as little more than an implicit assumption or the result of a limited frame of reference. Epistemologies vary. This course’s aim is first to examine what is known from a variety of perspectives. Beyond that, it seeks to compare analytically what counts as knowledge as well as what is known, by whom and for whom, how as well as why.
Three sets of questions guide the work of this course:
What is meant by teaching? What does it mean to distinguish “kinds of” teaching? Is there anything theoretically or conceptually overarching about “teaching” as a human and societal practice?
What is included in research on teaching? What is not, as well as what tends to be overlooked or excluded? How has the field of “research on teaching” developed? Who are the scholars who have been influential in its development, and why? What have been the consequences for what is “known” about teaching and for how such “knowledge” has or has not shaped educational practice and policy, and for whom?
What are (and have been over time) different methods of studying teaching, including “measuring” it? How do particular ways of studying teaching interact with the reproduction or disruption of historical patterns of marginalization and inequity in schools? How else might teaching be studied?