Leading a whole-class mathematics discussion is complex work. The teacher must attend to and respond to student thinking while continually keeping the mathematical goals of the discussion in mind. This work is especially challenging for novice teachers who are just learning to facilitate classroom talk. We present a new sortingtask instructional activity designed to support novice secondary teachers in steering a discussion toward a mathematical point while eliciting and making use of student thinking. We describe our efforts to support novice teachers through learning about, rehearsing, enacting, and reflecting on this sorting task. We document the impact of these supports for the novice teachers, and share ways that other teacher educators can take up this structure.
Approximations of practice provide opportunities for teacher candidates (TCs) to engage in the work of teaching in situations of reduced complexity. A problem of practice for teacher educators relates to how to represent student voice in approximations to engage TCs with interactive practices in meaningful ways. In this article, we share an analysis of our use of “planted errors” in coached rehearsals with secondary mathematics TCs focused on the practice of responding to errors in whole-class discussion. We highlight how different iterations of the planted errors affect the authenticity of how student voice was represented in the rehearsals and the resulting opportunities for TC learning. We offer design considerations for coached rehearsals and other approximations of practice.
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