Record Details

Novice and expert Grade 9 teachers’ responses to unexpected learner offers in the teaching of algebra

Pythagoras

 
 
Field Value
 
Title Novice and expert Grade 9 teachers’ responses to unexpected learner offers in the teaching of algebra
 
Creator Moodliar, Julian Abdulhamid, Lawan
 
Subject Mathematics education Responsive teaching; unexpected events; contingency; secondary school; algebra; novice and expert teachers
Description In South Africa, limited studies have been conducted investigating responsive teaching and little is known about how teachers respond to unexpected events ‘in the moment’ that did not form part of their planning. In this article, we report how a Grade 9 novice and expert teacher responded to unexpected learner offers during the teaching of algebra using a qualitative case study approach. Three consecutive lessons for each teacher were video recorded, transcribed and analysed. Our units of analysis for episodes were teachers’ responses to unexpected learner offers and we coded the responses as ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’. Indicators used to highlight the degree of quality of the response were ‘minimum’, ‘middle’ and ‘maximum’ if a response was coded as appropriate to a learner’s offer. Once lessons were analysed, the first author conducted video-stimulated recall interviews with each participant to gain insight into the two teachers’ thoughts and decision-making when responding to unexpected learner offers. The findings from this study illustrated that the novice teacher failed to press learners when their thinking was unclear, chose to ignore or provided an incorrect answer when faced with an unexpected learner offer. Conversely, the expert teacher continuously interrogated learner offers by pressing if a learner offer was unclear or if she wanted learners to explain their thinking. This suggests that the expert teacher’s responses were highly supportive of emergent mathematics learning in the collective classroom space.
 
Publisher AOSIS Publishing
 
Contributor University of the Witwatersrand
Date 2021-12-15
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — Qualitative case study
Format text/html application/epub+zip text/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/pythagoras.v42i1.624
 
Source Pythagoras; Vol 42, No 1 (2021); 13 pages 2223-7895 1012-2346
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://pythagoras.org.za/index.php/pythagoras/article/view/624/943 https://pythagoras.org.za/index.php/pythagoras/article/view/624/944 https://pythagoras.org.za/index.php/pythagoras/article/view/624/945 https://pythagoras.org.za/index.php/pythagoras/article/view/624/946
 
Coverage — — Novice and expert teacher
Rights Copyright (c) 2021 Julian Moodliar, Lawan Abdulhamid https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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