October 1, 2019
Symposium focuses on educators’ instructional visions
The College of Education’s Department of Mathematics, Science, and Instructional Technology Education sponsored a vision research symposium on Sept. 12.
The “Visions of High-Quality Instruction as a Lens for Teacher Learning” symposium invited three presenters to discuss their research into vision in the educational field.
Members of the ECU COE Department of Mathematics, Science and Instructional Technology Education organized the vision research symposium and invited the three speakers.
Front row, left to right: Monica Gonzalez, ECU COE assistant professor; Leigh Belford, ECU COE teaching instructor; and Amanda Jansen, presenter from the University of Delaware.
Back row, left to right: Charles Munter, presenter from University of Missouri; Carrie Lee, ECU COE assistant professor; Katie Schwartz, ECU COE associate professor; and Temple Walkowiak, presenter from North Carolina State University.
“Several of our ECU faculty members attended conference presentations and had been reading the work of our visiting scholars and wanted to know more about it,” said Dr. Katie Schwartz, an associate professor in mathematics education and one of the organizers of the event.
“Initially the plan was just to meet and share with our program faculty, which happened on Thursday and Friday mornings. However, we also wanted to share the opportunity with the greater community, especially since the focus was around the notion of a common vision of high-quality mathematics instruction,” Schwartz said. “So we decided to do the symposium and invite K-12 teachers and administrators and higher education faculty state-wide.”
In addition to the in-person participants, about 55 participants from at least 20 school districts and five universities across the state participated online. Each presenter was given about 20 minutes to discuss their topic with time after each presentation for small group discussions about the material.
Dr. Charles Munter from the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri discussed instructional visions and their relation to future practice.
He defined instructional practice as what teachers are already doing in the classroom. Then he defined what teacher educators say education should be like as instructional vision or the discourse that teachers or others currently use to characterize the kind of ideal classroom practice to which they aspire but have not necessarily mastered.
“Instructional vision and instructional practice might develop differently,” Munter said. “We should consider attending to not only what teachers do but also what they say as an important part of their professional development.”
Dr. Amanda Jansen from the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware focused on early-career teachers’ instructional visions for mathematics learning and the impact of teacher education.
The research she discussed focused on the experiences of graduates from the teacher education program at the University of Delaware and how their instructional vision was impacted by the teacher education program.
“I thought it was important to look at our graduates’ visions because it’s helping us understand what’s driving, I hope, how they’re trying to incrementally practice over time and how they’re trying to improve how they’re trying to become as a teacher,” said Jansen.
Dr. Temple Walkowiak from North Carolina State University in Raleigh talked about affordances and obstacles in the development of novice teachers’ instructional visions.
Her research followed preservice teachers through the teacher preparation program and their first year of teaching. She utilized Munter’s “role of the teacher” rubric that defines teachers as either deliverers of knowledge, monitors, facilitators, or more knowledgeable others.
One of the implications of Walkowiak’s research is that preservice teacher preparation programs should have an explicit focus on vision.
“Having our preservice teachers articulate their vision of high-quality math instruction and asking them to revisit it over the course of the preparation program and even think about it in relation to their own instructional practices,” she said.
The symposium organizers wanted to create an open, continued dialogue not only on ECU’s campus but across the state.
“Our main goal was to start a conversation about what we mean when we say high-quality mathematics instruction since people have different notions and bring different perspectives,” Schwartz said.
Mathematics educators were not the only ones in attendance. Instructors from the College of Education’s special education and literacy fields and the College of Arts and Sciences’ mathematics and chemistry departments attended the symposium as well
“Vision research is important to all teacher educators, and we can support our preservice and in-service teachers in developing an instructional vision,” said Dr. Anne Ticknor, an associate professor in the College of Education’s Department of Literacy Studies, English Education, and History Education. “As a literacy teacher educator it is important to encourage my students to develop instructional visions to work towards enacting in their (future) classrooms.”