Teacher time outs in rehearsals: in‑service teachers learning ambitious mathematics teaching practices

Abstract

The article focuses on rehearsals as part of a practice-based approach to professional development. Fourteen Norwegian elementary in-service teachers (ISTs) collaborate in learning cycles of enactment and investigation, where the overarching aim is to learn to enact the practices that constitute ambitious mathematics teaching. Rehearsals are an important part of these cycles. We examine the patterns of use of teacher time outs (TTOs) in rehearsals and how TTOs enable the ISTs to learn core practices of ambitious teaching. The findings reveal that approximately 60% of the time in rehearsals is spent on ISTs’ teaching and 40% on TTOs. The TTOs enable the ISTs to learn together the practices of using representations, aiming towards goals, launching problems, organising the board and facilitating student talk. The findings reveal that the participants were able to work simultaneously on multiple practices, and a recurrent theme in the TTOs is representing students’ ideas as accurately as possible whilst simultaneously considering the mathematical correctness of the representations.