September 2014, Vol. 3, Issue 1
Using Task Dialogues to Enhance Preservice Teachers’ Abilities to Orchestrate Discourse
Denise A. Spangler, University of Georgia, Allyson Hallman-Thrasher, Ohio University
We describe an activity designed to help preservice elementary school teachers develop mathematical knowledge for teaching in the domain of facilitating mathematical discussions. The activity involved preservice teachers writing task dialogues, imaginary conversations between a child and teacher about a problem-solving task, in which they practice responding to correct, partially correct, and incorrect student responses. Preservice teachers then implemented these same tasks with children in a field experience setting. We describe 2 different iterations of the activity and field experience in detail as well as the insights into preservice teacher knowledge each iteration afforded us.
* In accordance with
MTE
policy regarding potential conflicts of interest with the editor, the review process for this manuscript was handled by Denisse R. Thompson.
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