Outtake: Fitting it all in: Time Challenges in Lesson Pacing

Planning a common lesson to achieve specified goals is challenging for a group of five mathematics teacher educators from different institutions across the United States. Deciding the exact sequence of tasks, determining how much support to provide our students, and considering levels of understanding for students, all while scheduling meetings across three different time zones, gets complicated. One of the biggest, unanticipated challenges we faced, however, was the amount of time it took to implement the lesson and ensure all topics were adequately discussed.

We began our research project in June 2015, as we gathered to investigate what elementary preservice teachers (PSTs) notice when they analyze children’s written mathematical solutions strategies (Jacobs, Lamb, & Philipp, 2010). We drew upon Jacobs et al.’s “Professional Noticing of Children’s Mathematical Thinking,” in which teachers first attend to students’ mathematical strategies, interpret their mathematical understanding, and then decide on the next steps to guide instruction.