Responsive Teaching and the Instructional Reasoning of Expert Elementary Mathematics Teachers

Abstract

This study examines instructional reasoning in an approximation of practice that simulates a teacher sitting down after class to examine students’ written work. The participants were prompted to attend to, interpret, and decide how to respond to student thinkin g contained in a piece of written work. Our purpose was to capture the additional cognitive work that teachers engage in. Using qualitative content analysis, we identified the most frequent types of instructional reasoning used by expert teachers just prior to engaging in a responsive deciding action about how to respond. We used the results of our analysis to present three illustrative cases of responsive instructional reasoning.