This study explores the ways in which teachers' interventions interact with and occasion
the growth of students' mathematical understanding. Two 'cases' were documented, and
these form the two strands of my research. The first strand concerns data collected in my
own high school classroom at a time when I was a full-time teacher of mathematics in a
small, rural secondary school in the United Kingdom. The second strand concerns data
collected in a mathematics classroom in a large, urban high school in Vancouver, British
Columbia.
The data consist of videotaped lessons in each of the two classrooms, videotaped
interviews with students from both strands of the data, copies of students' work from both
strands, videotaped interviews with the Vancouver teacher, and my own journal entries.
Analysis of the data, which is described in six stages, resulted in the generation of fifteen
themes to describe the teachers' actions-in-the-moment. Three of these themes are
distinguished from the others as teaching styles, as contrasted with the remaining twelve
teaching strategies, and a number of the teaching strategies are clustered within the three
teaching styles. The notion of a 'continuum of telling' is developed, upon which the three
teaching styles lie, and this continuum is explored in order to probe the ways in which
teachers' interventions interact with the growth of students' mathematical understanding.
The ways in which teachers' interventions occasion the growth of students' mathematical
understanding is probed through an integration of detailed traces of the students' growth
of understanding with contemporaneous considerations of the teachers' strategies and
styles. Implications to be drawn from these analyses, both for the research community and
for teaching and learning, are discussed.
I also share my reflections on my own growth as a teacher and as a researcher that I have
experienced as a result of participating in, and conducting, this study.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/9613 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Towers, Julie Margaret |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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