Teachers’ Uses of a Learning Trajectory in Student-Centered Instructional Practices

Abstract

The growing national attention to students’ learning trajectories (LTs) renews the opportunity to explore the ways that teachers may use students’ thinking in their instruction. In this article, we examine teachers’ learning of two frameworks, one for students’ thinking in a particular domain and one for broad student-centered instructional practices, in the context of an elementary grades mathematics professional development setting. As a part of a retrospective analysis of a design experiment, we analyzed 19 lessons of teachers who participated in 60 hr of professional development designed to support their learning of one LT and one framework about student-centered instructional practices. Our findings describe the ways in which teachers brought together these frameworks to enact instructional practices that elicit and use students’ mathematical thinking in classroom instruction. We conclude by arguing that LTs can serve as a referent for student-centered instructional practices, bridging guidelines for student-centered instruction with domain-specific understandings of students’ thinking for teachers.