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Reframing teacher knowledge: a research and development agenda

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Abstract

This article undertakes a reframing of the concept of teacher knowledge. It argues that in order to help teachers create more powerful learning environments, a much more general framing is required—one that incorporates a teacher’s perceptions, inclinations and orientations as well as their understandings and related proficiencies. A main point of departure is the Teaching for Robust Understanding (TRU) framework, which focuses on essential dimensions of classroom practice. Questions of teacher knowledge are reframed as: “How can we reconceptualize teacher knowledge (perhaps better, teacher proficiency) so that it encompasses the broad range of perceptions, orientations, understandings and proficiencies that support teachers in crafting learning environments from which students emerge as knowledgeable, flexible, and resourceful thinkers and problem solvers? How can it be organized so that it can be worked on productively? This paper explores these issues. It employs the TRU framework as the initial mechanism for reframing, while drawing on Schoenfeld’s (How we think. Routledge, New York, 2010) work on teachers’ decision making and Schoenfeld and Kilpatrick’s (International handbook of mathematics teacher education, volume 2: tools and processes in mathematics teacher education. Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, pp 321–354, 2008) work on teacher proficiency to suggest what should be included in an expanded framing of teacher knowledge.

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Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Reproduced, with permission, from Schoenfeld & The Teaching for Robust Understanding Project 2016, p. 2

Fig. 3
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Fig. 8

Reproduced with permission from Burkhardt & Schoenfeld, 2019

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Notes

  1. One reviewer noted a tension between the fact that the framework discussed here is mathematics-specific, while the claims about teaching are general. There is a domain-general version of TRU, available at http://TRUFramework.org. Given that this article was written for ZDM and all of the examples I provide are mathematical, I have chosen to focus on the mathematics-specific version of TRU.

  2. Note that making the observation itself is part of an effective teacher’s proficiency—cf. the “noticing” literature, e.g., Sherin, Jacobs, and Philipp, 2010.

  3. Please note that these words are written by a mathematician whose early work was on the existence of continuous measure-preserving maps between Peano spaces, hardly an everyday topic. But, as discussed in Sect. 3.2, formal mathematics is often deeply grounded in personal experience.

  4. If you are unfamiliar with whack-a-mole, take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbyekup6i6U.

  5. This is made clear in the Teacher’s Guide for the lesson.

  6. Evidence of the impact of the FALs can be found in Herman, Epstein, Leon, La Torre Matrundola, Reber, & Choi (2014) and Research for Action (2015).

  7. As noted in the introduction, Teacher Knowledge is a necessary but not sufficient component of what must be addressed. Teachers cannot be expected to do all the heavy lifting on their own: they need to be supported by well designed materials. That critically important issue is beyond the scope of this paper.

  8. There is also the question of how teachers deal with the larger environment (e.g., high stakes testing and other pressures), leveraging those aspects of the environment that can contribute to student learning and minimizing the impact of negative factors. Fully addressing that question is beyond the scope of this agenda, as is the equally critical question of how to design curricular materials and professional development that support teachers in develo** the relevant Knowledge.

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Acknowledgements

This paper was produced with support from the National Science Foundation grant 1503454, “TRUmath and Lesson Study: Supporting Fundamental and Sustainable Improvement in High School Mathematics Teaching,” a partnership between the Oakland Unified School District, Mills College, the SERP Institute, and the University of California at Berkeley. I am grateful to Abraham Arcavi, Hugh Burkhardt, Paul Cobb, Phil Daro, Michael Driskill, Fady El Chidiac, Catherine Lewis, Guoxiang Wang, and three anonymous reviewers for comments that enriched this manuscript.

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    Alan H. Schoenfeld

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Schoenfeld, A.H. Reframing teacher knowledge: a research and development agenda. ZDM Mathematics Education 52, 359–376 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-019-01057-5

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