Teacher Press to Establish What Counts as an Acceptable Explanation Grounded in Problem Settings

This study elaborates on the sociomathematical norm of what counts as an acceptable mathematical explanation by focusing on cases in which tasks are grounded in settings that exist outside pure mathematics. We propose that establishing this norm supports the more equitable distribution of student learning opportunities by making the rationale for particular solution methods more accessible to all students. The data that we analyzed to understand the specific strategies teachers use to initiate and guide the negotiation of this norm come from video-recordings of two 7th-grade teachers’ classroom instruction after a short, targeted professional development. The analysis we conducted is grounded in the symbolic interactionist view that normative ways of communicating and acting are negotiated through interaction on an ongoing basis. Our findings show that the teachers used two strategies to support students to ground their explanations in extra-mathematical settings, but these strategies were largely unsuccessful. We use excerpts from classroom discussions to explain why these strategies did not work and make suggestions for both future research and professional development.