Opportunities for Adopting a Discourse of Explorations in a Professional Development Setting

Overview & Synopsis

We examine the productiveness of discussions in a professional development (PD) towards explorative mathematics instruction (EMI). The artifacts used in the PD session under examination were a video-clip of a classroom discussion, together with the Quadrants coding scheme, a scheme originally developed for research purposes. We define productive discussions by relying on the linguistic tool of lexical chains that point to lexical cohesion. The analysis shows that the use of the coding scheme as an artifact, together with a video clip, offered increased opportunities for surfacing misalignments between the teachers' framing of learning and instruction and the PD leader's framing of it. These misaligned frames, which draw on the Acquisition Pedagogical Discourse, vs. Explorations Pedagogical Discourse, are usually difficult to surface.