Exploring How Teachers Respond: A Practice-based Functional Approach

What is it about?

In this article, we share a tool called the Modified-Responding Framework for assisting teachers and researchers in gaining a deeper understanding of their interactions with students in mathematics class. This tool combines insights from practicing teachers, mathematics educators and language experts to offer a framework for analyzing teachers’ practices of responding to students’ mathematical contributions. Transcripts from lesson excerpts were analyzed using this framework, and the results were compared with paired commentary on those same excerpts produced by an educational researcher and practitioner otherwise disconnected from the framework's creation. The comparison reveals the framework’s potential for highlighting aspects of responding considered important by both practitioners and researchers—enabling the two groups to collectively reflect on practice and develop better theories for effective teaching.

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Photo by Annika Gordon on Unsplash

Photo by Annika Gordon on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The Modified-Responding Framework is important because it helps teachers and researchers understand and improve how teachers interact with students during mathematics lessons. This framework lets us delve into classroom interactions and see how teachers' responses to students’ mathematical contributions shape the interaction that follows. The framework can also be used to investigate how different aspects of the classroom environment influence teachers' choices in responding to students. For example, it can show us how different types of student contributions (correct, incorrect, novel, productive for the goal’s of the lesson, etc.) might shape teachers’ decisions about how to respond. Finally, this framework makes important strides towards providing teachers and researchers common language for talking about and better understanding teaching.