Ethan Smith

In sum, CRMT cannot be achieved strictly through standardized curricula. But these materials ARE the framework for millions of students' experiences w/ math in the US, and warrant scrutiny. This analysis suggests urgency + paths toward greater attention to CRMT in such materials. (8/8)

We recognize the present political climate is explicitly hostile toward equity & cultural responsiveness. This sort of investigation not only calls attention to the current desultory approach to CRMT in curricula, but also provides tools for stakeholders to advocate for CRMT. (7/8)

To be clear, CRMT requires RESPONSIVENESS to a particular set of students, so standardized curriculum materials inherently require adaptation and to be balanced with other instructional resources and supports. But this is NOT an excuse for curricula to ignore attention to CRMT. (6/8)

What does this tell us? Well...these materials are presenting SOME opportunities to attend to culturally responsive math teaching (CRMT), but their sporadic and siloed attention toward CRM suggests the need to adapt and supplement such materials to support CRMT. (5/8)

There was greater attention toward promoting high cognitive demand, but CRM aspects such as disrupting status issues or using math to address social issues was pretty much nonexistent in the analyzed materials. (4/8)

What did we find? Well...these curricula provide only brief attention toward culturally responsive mathematics (CRM), but there ARE differences across curricula. Perhaps unsurprisingly, curricula attend more to the dominant dimensions of equity than the critical dimensions. (3/8)

We analyzed the middle school materials of six different widely adopted math curricula, considering how the materials present opportunities to attend to Zavala and Aguirre's CRMT2 framework. (2/8)

#mathedresearch #mtbos I am excited to share the newly published article I cowrote with Riley Stone and Raisa Ebner, titled "Culturally Responsive Mathematics and Curriculum Materials: Present Realities and Imagined Futures." You can view the article here: mdpi.com/2227-7102/15... (1/8)

However, coaching is also social in nature--coaches are not merely vessels for implementing district policies. These findings also show the value in considering the perceptions of different participants in school policy. Teacher and coach perceptions of their shared work matters!

We discuss how this shows that coaches can play a positive role in fostering positive perceptions of district PL+curricula, but they also act as "cheerleaders" of these policies, with higher perceptions of their quality compared to their teachers.

What might be going on here? A few ideas: (1) coaches may be focusing on the curriculum BECAUSE their teachers are not (yet) bought into the materials. (2) Teachers may have lower perceptions BECAUSE they have engaged deeply with the curriculum - they know its strengths + flaws.

Interestingly we found that coaches who used curriculum materials MORE in their coaching worked with teachers who reported the PL+curriculum to be of LOWER quality. You might think greater focus leads to greater teacher buy-in/agreement, but we did not find this to be the case.

We also found that teachers who reported higher coach quality--both expertise and affective quality (e.g., “My coach is respectful and collegial”) also had higher perceptions of PL+curriculum quality. Perceptions of coaching quality matter!

However, teachers who had an instructional coach had stronger perceptions about the quality of their PL and curriculum. So coaching--or districts that use coaching and other supports--seemed to strengthen teachers' perceptions of PL and curriculum quality.

We found that coaches had more positive views about the quality of district-mandated PL and curriculum materials compared to teachers. True for specificity, consistency, buy-in, institutional authority. So coaches view PL+curriculum in meaningfully dift ways than their teachers

Coach and teacher alignment in the context of educational change - Journal of Educational Change Professional learning (PL) programs increasingly rely on the expertise of instructional coaches in supporting teacher learning and instructional change. To continue to improve the use of coaching as a...

New #mathedresearch article alert! We investigated middle school math teacher+coach perceptions about quality of professional learning and the curriculum materials embedded in that PL, and considered coaching approaches that may have influenced teachers’ perceptions. doi.org/10.1007/s108...

If you are interested in reading and need help accessing the full article, please DM me! (10/10)

This process also underscores how a tool never “achieves validity,” but rather instrument users can gain new and valuable insights into the phenomenon, the tool, and themselves by remaining ever curious in considering the uses and implications of such instruments. (9/10)

These results indicate the value of using multiple raters and collaborative resolution mtgs when investigating complex phenomena like class instruction, as this approach allowed our team’s discussions to go beyond agreement/disagreement to instead focus on what counts as evidence (8/10)

346 (85%) of disagreements occurred when raters observed different evidence which influenced their initial ratings. In essence, class instruction is COMPLEX, and having multiple coders helps capture nuances in instruction! (7/10)

We also wanted to understand reliability beyond the context of agreement. So we analyzed 1050 resolution scores to see whether disagreements arose from reviewers seeing the same evidence and disagreeing, or one reviewer capturing additional evidence initially. (6/10)

Building on literature regarding student engagement and motivation in mathematics (Middleton et al., 2017), we ultimately wrote 15 observation rubrics. Eight of these focused on academic support to investigate (1) students’ opportunities for sense making and reasoning, (2) connections between representations or strategies, (3) pressing students to explain, (4) contexts of tasks, (5) mathematical correctness, (6) mathematics language use, (7) feedback, and (8) students’ opportunities for agency and autonomy. Also building on literature, we wrote seven social support rubrics intended to investigate (9) whole class discourse, (10) small group discourse, (11) status raising, (12) motivational discourse, (13) enthusiasm about mathematics, (14) attention to students’ lives, and (15) account ability and high expectations. We acknowledge that social support and academic support are often blended in some of these teaching practices.

A rubric for status raising/positioning students as mathematically competent from the PEMTP

We had 15 rubrics on PEMTP-8 on academic support, 7 on social support. As a lead on the observation team let me assure you, this was a lot of data to capture and analyze! (5/10)

A screen capture of text from the referenced journal article.

We discuss our approach to coding instructional episodes in 10-min segments in comparison to coding entire lessons or shorter/longer time periods. We found the segmented approach to offer benefits in precision of the coding and retrieval of evidence for dissemination of findings (4/10)

Figure describing eight steps that the SMiLES research team took for establishing evidence of validity for the PEMTP

We describe the importance for researchers to share their process of establishing validity evidence and walk through our own approach. It is multifaceted (and sometimes messy) but important work! (3/10)

We share about our process of establishing validity/reliability evidence for a classroom observation tool, PEMTP (Potentially Engaging Mathematics Teaching Practices). This comes from the SMiLES project with Jim and Mandy as PI & co-PI. I joined as research assistant my 1st year of PhD! (2/10)

Potentially engaging mathematics teaching practices in secondary classrooms: Investigating observation tool validity and score reliability The purpose of this report is to present our process for establishing evidence of validity and reliability of an observation tool [PEMTP: Potentially Engaging Mathematics Teaching Practices] used t...

Happy to share a new pub in Investigations in Mathematics Learning by myself, @mandymathed.bsky.social , Jim Middleton, and Cathy Cullicott doi.org/10.1080/1947... (1/10)

Me at 2am, looking at a new call for manuscripts for a topic entirely outside of my expertise, writing up an abstract that (1) uses all of the keywords from the call and (2) then states "in this paper, I will..." and proceed to just explain my own thing.