Melbourne Graduate School of Education - Theses

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    Creating the conditions for rich teacher-led whole-class discussions
    Sing, Siew Hoon ( 2013)
    Teacher-led whole class discussion is an important pedagogical tool that is still widely used in classrooms today. This research analysed video recordings of four actual mathematics classrooms to look for segments where rich discussions in mathematics were taking place in order to understand how the teachers created the conditions for those rich discussions. By providing an empirical foundation for the construct of a ‘rich’ discussion, this research hopes to contribute towards greater understanding of the nature, enabling conditions and possible outcomes of a rich discussion. The findings of this research project suggest that teachers play a critical role in creating conditions favourable to the occurrence of rich discussions by their actions or non-actions towards student responses. It is hoped that the results of this research will contribute towards informing both teaching practice and programmes of teacher education.
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    The positioning of the coach and the transformative agency of teachers: The problem of constituting joint meaning in an “underperforming” secondary mathematics department
    DIMAGGIO, SOL ( 2013)
    The Victorian State Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) instituted a coaching program (2007-2010) to improve teaching in primary and secondary schools. The DEECD policy platform of school improvement through teacher-trained coaches saw the employment of Teaching and Learning Coaches (henceforth “coach”) employed from 2007 to support mathematics and science instruction. Eleven numeracy coaches were deployed across the western metropolitan region of Melbourne in 2008 and placed in schools that were identified as “underperforming” based on student performance data. This research focuses on two school sites in which a coach worked at each on a weekly rotational basis in an onsite professional development program to improve teaching practice using a sanctioned generic mathematics lesson structure. The coaching program in this study involved the teachers of mathematics, the appointment of school-based coaches from among them, and administrators in the targeted “underperforming” secondary schools, with the intention of changing the prima facie unproductive, culturally specific, mathematics teaching practices in those schools. This thesis examines how mathematics teachers in targeted “underperforming” schools reported how they were influenced, by working with a coach. The research is founded on the theoretical belief that there is nothing else to social life but symbolic exchanges and the joint construction and management of meaning, including the meaning of bits of stuff including things we control and things that we don’t, but are expected to use to “remake” ourselves. To become relevant in the teachers’ life spaces the coaching stuff, including the coach herself, had to be interpreted to play a part in a human narrative. Interpretations require grammars that are historically and culturally local. The thesis presents fine-grained descriptive analyses of the semiotic interactions and the psychological positioning of mathematics teachers in the accounts of their experiences of the coaching program. The recommended practices put by the coach were resisted where they were seen not to serve the teachers’ personal identity formation in the local moral order of their school. The teachers’ social activity with the coach shows they live in a double social order. One component consists of the social arrangements for maintaining their teaching lives in their teaching environment, which was difficult by virtue of the educational disadvantage of the community, they served and their own poor training and professional isolation. This is the practical order and the teachers had their local proper place in that order. The other component consisted of the social arrangements for creating honour and status. This is an expressive order. The material world of privileged strategies, tactics, student test performance data and other elements of the program of improvement brought by the coach can be understood in their full human significance only if their roles in both these orders are identified. As to the teachers’ social motivation around these material things, the accounts of the teachers present a strong case for the priority of the expressive over the practical in their social action. The new lesson structure the coach introduced can become a social object only within the dynamic frame of the teachers’ storylines. It is this most ephemeral and “invisible” product of the teachers’ action that is really real, the narratives that are realized in the social orders in their school. The elaboration of a more comprehensive theory of mentoring / coaching practices based on this approach to constructing a new constitutive order involves a study of the social objects as created in and through constitutive practices. This draws on a distinction between constitutive orders of the rules of maths teaching, which are prospective doings, and sayings constructed around social objects, and institutional orders of maths teaching, which are retrospective and depend on “accounts” and justifications. It is essential that constitutive orders of practice are collaborations. Taking all this into account requires thinking of meaning making as one of communication or interaction, or as Harré argues, taking conversation as real or causal. To make sense of, or claim meaning in, the teachers’ constitutively ordered conversational sequences about their interactions with the coach, in the use of social objects, their self organising practices or language games, is to explore their orientation to a constitutive rule and their exhibition of it to others.
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    An investigation of the impact of LEGO® robotics on the learning of scientific and mathematical concepts at primary level
    Maxwell, Carla Dawn ( 2013)
    This study analysed the way students at grade 3 and 4 learned to manipulate the design projects that are part of lessons from the LEGO® Mindstorms Robotics Invention system. Students worked in cooperative groups of three to four members. Within the hour allocated for each lesson the participants swapped roles, being either a programmer or LEGO® designer. The students were required to utilise many skills, including design, directional language, communication and evaluation. The research methods of the study are qualitative. To find out what the students were learning the research relied on observational notes, written records and photographs. The research aimed to compile evidence of how this style of learning affected the outcomes of student’s achievement and attitudes. Students were required to analyse something that was active. They had to write observational notes to show their understanding of what was occurring and they also had to document how they changed the program to effect the robot’s movements.
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    Quality interactions for mathematics learning: how early childhood teachers enact a suite of play-based mathematics activities with children aged from three to five years
    Cohrssen, Caroline Susan ( 2013)
    The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia (EYLF; DEEWR, 2009) requires early childhood educators to implement a play-based curriculum to teach children mathematical ideas in the years before school. Many early childhood educators report anxiety about their own mathematical knowledge and uncertainty about how to go about meeting this requirement of the framework. This implementation study used a mixed-methods, multiple case study approach to investigate how different early childhood educators implemented a packaged suite of play-based mathematics activities with 122 children aged from three to five years. Six early childhood educators agreed to present one activity from the provided suite of activities each day to a small group of children. Data were derived from educators’ self-reported implementation records, semi-structured interviews with participants at three points over a seven-month period, and video-recordings of educators presenting a play-based mathematics activity. Video-recordings were transcribed and analysed using Conversation Analysis. Assessments of pedagogical quality were made at room level and at group level at the start and end of the study. Children were assessed using selected tests of cognitive ability and achievement from the Woodcock-Johnson III at the start and end of the implementation phase. Findings demonstrate that systematic and repeated use of the suite of play-based mathematics activities is associated with teachers’ increased mathematics confidence, and higher quality emotional support and instructional support. Woodcock-Johnson III Concept Formation W scores obtained at the start and end of the seven month-implementation phase show that frequent use of the play-based activities was also associated with a significant increase in children’s learning outcomes. In addition, the systematic and purposeful use of a curriculum (activities, pedagogical strategies and mathematical language) supports the sequential and child-appropriate incorporation of mathematical concepts in an early childhood program. Consistency across settings in quality and frequency of mathematics teaching facilitates a positive and more equitable learning trajectory for all children.