Commognitive conflicts between an instructor and a teacher in a professional development focused on tutoring struggling students in mathematics

Abstrakti

This study examines interactions between an instructor and a teacher within a professional development intervention focused on tutoring students with difficulties in mathematics. The study analyzed the discourse of a middle school teacher and her instructor (first author) during a one-on-one professional development designed to make teachers aware of their role in preserving cycles of failure in students' mathematical learning. Using commognitive theory, the analysis surfaces commognitive conflicts within the instructor and the teacher's discourse during their discussions about teaching, and particularly, about tutoring a student whom the teacher described as exceptionally "weak". We found moments of disagreement in which the participants appeared to be discussing the same issue, while actually drawing on different meta-rules, or underlying assumptions about teaching and learning. These moments of disagreement were explored to uncover the implicit pedagogical meta-rules followed by the teacher and the instructor. Our analysis showed that the two drew on distinct sets of meta-rules, which could be organized around two metaphors of learning: a delivery/acquisition metaphor and a growth/construction metaphor.