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What StoryCircles Can Do for Mathematics Teaching and Teacher Education

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Book cover Scripting Approaches in Mathematics Education

Part of the book series: Advances in Mathematics Education ((AME))

Abstract

This chapter conceptualizes and illustrates StoryCircles, a form of professional education that builds on the knowledge of practitioners and engages them in collective, iterative scripting, visualization of, and argumentation about mathematics lessons using multimedia. The drive to invent and study new forms of professional education for mathematics teachers, such as StoryCircles, is predicated on the need to improve mathematics instruction. While many such efforts aim to support teachers in making broad sweeping changes, few take into account the actual predicaments of practice that make such changes difficult. StoryCircles aims to support teachers in making incremental improvements to practice by eliciting teachers’ practical wisdom and enabling participants to use each other’s knowledge and experience as resources for professional learning. In this chapter we outline critical characteristics of the StoryCircles practice and illustrate how they are connected to seminal anchors in the professional development literature. We also illustrate those features with examples from various instantiations of StoryCircles. We close by providing some considerations for the affordances we see for the practice—both for the profession and for individual groups of teachers.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    To refer in general to this genre of professional education, we use the plural StoryCircles. We use the singular StoryCircle to refer to a group engaged in StoryCircles.

  2. 2.

    By multimodality we mean that classroom communication uses a multiplicity of communication modalities. By multivocality we mean that classroom communication includes a multiplicity (hence a diversity) of voices sharing the communication modalities (see Herbst, Chazan, Chen, Chieu, & Weiss, 2011).

  3. 3.

    The county’s as well as the participants’ names are pseudonyms.

  4. 4.

    We mention these as examples of variously desirable kinds of teaching, under no pretense that the elements listed are equivalent or that the list is comprehensive.

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Acknowledgement

The writing of this chapter has been supported by NSF grant DRL-1316241 to D. Chazan and P. Herbst; some of the activities reported were supported by NSF grant DRL-0918425 to P. Herbst and D. Chazan and by a subcontract to P. Herbst of a Mathematics and Science Partnership grant from the U.S. Department of Education through the State of Michigan Department of Education to the Macomb Intermediate School District (APR # MI50804, Deborah Ferry, P.I.). All opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the sponsors.

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  1. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Patricio Herbst & Amanda Milewski

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  1. Patricio Herbst
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Correspondence to Patricio Herbst .

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  1. Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

    Rina Zazkis

  2. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

    Patricio Herbst

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Herbst, P., Milewski, A. (2018). What StoryCircles Can Do for Mathematics Teaching and Teacher Education. In: Zazkis, R., Herbst, P. (eds) Scripting Approaches in Mathematics Education . Advances in Mathematics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62692-5_15

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