Mg. Ortiz-Jiménez, Andrés

Teacher leaders (TLs) play a pivotal role in monitoring and fostering teacher awareness to enhance the quality of teaching practices, particularly in domains like mathematics education. Within the mathematics curriculum across various nations, this monitoring effort has been channelled towards nurturing crucial competencies such as argumentation among students. While existing literature underscores the significance of instructional support in fostering student argumentation, it’s imperative to recognize that developing a keen sense of noticing extends beyond merely understanding students’ thinking processes. It involves a multifaceted approach encompassing elements like deciphering teacher responses. In the context of a professional development initiative aimed at supporting TLs to promote argumentation within mathematics classrooms, we delved into the participation of novice TLs in a program session. Our goal was to assess their capacity to identify critical events crucial for supporting argumentation in teaching and learning scenarios related to mathematics. During the session, TLs were presented with a video depicting a student argumentation scenario, tasked with recognizing key events and interpreting them in the context of fostering argumentation through instructional support. We employed an adapted noticing scale van Es (in: Sherin MG, Jacobs V, Philipp R (eds) Mathematics teacher noticing: seeing through teachers' eyes, Routledge, Abingdon, pp 134–151, 2011) to evaluate their responses, explicitly focusing on critical events within argumentative orchestration. Findings show that TLs demonstrated an estimable level of proficiency in recognizing essential events of argumentation. Notably, a majority showed an ability to establish meaningful connections between identified critical events and a framework for argumentative orchestration. This suggests promising potential for TLs to support and facilitate argumentation within mathematics education settings effectively.

Given the importance of modelling in mathematics classrooms, and despite the extensive body of research on teacher support for promoting the mathematical modelling cycle in the classroom, authors have overlooked how teacher support for argumentation can contribute to this cycle. This study is aimed at characterizing teacher support for argumentation in the mathematical modelling cycle in the classroom. We analyzed 10 class episodes taken from the cases of two teachers, Soledad and Ángeles. The episodes were analyzed considering teacher support for argumentative orchestration (communicative strategies and pattern recognition). In the two cases studied, we found that argumentative orchestration exhibited different types of overall presence and recurrence throughout the stages of the mathematical modelling cycle, with communicative strategies being more present across the board and more recurrent in the mathematical modelling cycle than pattern recognition strategies.