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general interests
My work fits within and extends a growing body of research that explores the long-term supports that enable teachers and schools to meet the complex demands of teaching mathematics for understanding. I have studied how teachers learn about children’s thinking in mathematics and how teachers’ collaborative inquiry creates new cultures of learning within schools. My concern with teacher learning rests fundamentally on my concern for student learning – the kind of learning that honors students’ ideas and views schools as places for vibrant intellectual life for teachers and students.
central themes in my research
:Examining Tools for Professional Education and Teacher Learning
Investigating Student Learning & Assessment in Classrooms
Creating a press for understanding
Examining student thinking on standardized tests
Understanding children's experiences across mathematics and literacy
Using student work to promote teacher inquiry
My study of teaching and learning in mathematics speaks directly to the improvement of policies and practices regarding teachers’ professional development. My dissertation examined how teachers’ professional inquiry outside of the classroom was linked to their learning inside the classroom and to opportunities for school change. I used multiple-case methodology to analyze teachers’ joint work in one urban elementary school as they discussed their own students’ work. Much is being said now about using artifacts of practice, such as student work, to organize professional development. The use of student work has the potential to influence professional discourse about teaching and learning, to engage teachers in a cycle of experimentation and reflection and to shift teachers’ focus from one of general pedagogy to one that is particularly connected to their own students. Whether these opportunities are realized depends on the actual use of student work in professional activity. However, as several recent reviews of professional development have repeatedly noted, the research on professional development lacks empirical data on how teachers engage in collective inquiry and what impact it has on their learning. The findings emerging from this work include: (1) teacher learning is enhanced when teachers learn to pay attention to the details of their students’ thinking, (2) the study of student work enables teachers to deepen both their subject matter knowledge and to improve their classroom practice, and (3) teachers’ classroom practice develops more substantially when their classroom experimentation is closely coupled to their engagement in professional development.
Kazemi, E., & Franke, M.L. (2004). Teacher learning in mathematics: Using student work to promote collective inquiry. Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 7, 203-235.
Franke, M., Kazemi, E., Shih, J., Biagetti, S., & Battey, D. (in press). Changing teachers’ professional work in mathematics: One school’s journey. In T.A. Romberg,T.P. Carpenter, T. P., & F. Dremock (Eds.) Understanding mathematics and science matters. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Franke, M.L., & Kazemi, E. (2001). Learning to teach mathematics: Developing a focus on students’ mathematical thinking. Theory into Practice, 40, 102-109.
Franke, M.L., & Kazemi, E. (2001). Teaching as learning within a community of practice: Characterizing generative growth. In T. Wood, B. Nelson, & J. Warfield (Eds.). Beyond classical pedagogy in elementary mathematics: The nature of facilitative teaching (pp. 47-74). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Investigating teacher knowledge and the relationship between classroom practice and professional development
ECML: Expanding Community of Mathematics Learners
Teachers’ efforts to inquire into student work are part of a larger domain of professional learning, which I have studied in several ways. For the past five years, I have been co-PI of a $3.9 million teacher leadership grant from the National Science Foundation called Expanding the Community of Mathematics Learners (ECML). This project has engaged about 300 elementary teachers across six districts in investigating student thinking, building leadership capacity, and improving classroom instruction and professional community. These teacher leaders have, in turn, worked with several hundred colleagues in facilitating professional development in mathematics.
One question I have pursued is how professional development influences teachers’ classroom practices. Papers examine (1) the pedagogical dilemmas teachers face as they learn more about children’s thinking in mathematics and (2) how teachers’ current curriculum materials and tools constrict their capacity to elicit and make use of children’s thinking in instruction. One theme, which is developed across both papers, is how professional development can more dynamically address the genuine questions that teachers face in their classroom practice as they continually learn. Much of the professional development for elementary mathematics teachers is designed to introduce them to children’s thinking in various mathematical domains, and my research is pointing to the important need of designing work for teachers further down the learning trajectory. A third paper uses data from my dissertation and from ECML to raise questions about how teachers’ engagement in their classroom and professional development mutually influence each other. I also raise design issues for professional development – if we better understand the trajectories of participation that teachers experience as they engage with professional development and their classroom, then how can professional educators better support teacher learning?
Kazemi, E., & Lenges, A. Relating professional development in mathematics to the classroom. Unpublished manuscript.
Kazemi, E. (2004, April). The interaction between classroom practice and professional development. In K. McClain (Chair), Articulating effective design principles in professional development: A focus on interactions. Symposium conducted at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego.
New Work: A second and related question concerns the development of teachers’ content knowledge. In the ECML grant, we used seminar materials called Developing Mathematical Ideas(DMI) created by Deborah Schifter, Virginia Bastable, and Susan Jo Russell at EDC in Boston. Many of these seminar materials were actually under development during our grant. The authors relied on our feedback as they created and refined these materials, especially in the seminars focused on measurement, geometry, data analysis, and algebraic thinking. I was involved in developing the algebraic thinking and data analysis materials. Growing out of this developmental work, I have set in motion research on what teachers learned about interpreting data using what to them were new representational tools (stem and leaf plots, box plots). I am also studying what teachers bring to the study of algebraic thinking in the elementary grades, which is the focus of much new research in mathematics education. Together with Steve Monk, a mathematician at UW, we piloted and studied the DMI seminar on algebraic thinking. We are now analyzing how teachers engaged with the mathematics in that particular seminar, paying specific attention to how elementary teachers’ work with arithmetic influences their understanding of algebraic ideas.
Investigating Student Learning & Assessment in Classrooms
My work with teachers is fueled by my understanding of children and classroom practice. Therefore, the second thrust of my research agenda focuses on student learning and assessment in classrooms, in mathematics and other subject domains.
Creating a press for understanding
My first study of classrooms examined the teacher’s role in creating norms for classroom discourse that supported students to build understandings about mathematics, what I called a “press for understanding.”
Kazemi, E., & Stipek, D. (2001). Promoting conceptual thinking in four upper-elementary mathematics classrooms. Elementary School Journal, 102, 59-80.
Kazemi, E. (1998). Discourse that promotes conceptual understanding. Teaching Children Mathematics, 4, 410-414.
Examining student thinking on standardized tests
Emerging from my work with teachers is a new aspect of my research about student learning. One of the major obstacles to pressing for understanding is the increasing demands standardized testing places on teachers. Many teachers respond to these testing pressures by narrowing their curriculum or changing their pedagogy to be less student-centered. I have felt the need to widen my research on children’s experiences in classrooms to include their experience with assessments, and I believe this aspect of my research will continue to grow. I selected sample problems from the Washington Assessment of Student Learning that might be difficult for students based on current research on children’s thinking. I found that students’ interpretation of problem situations can mask their underlying knowledge of the mathematics content. Attention to the way students reason, I argue, is vital both for test writers as they design assessment tasks and for teachers as they prepare students to understand the demands of particular kinds of tasks. This attention to measuring student learning is important in my research on teacher learning as the expectation to link teacher learning to student learning is becoming paramount in designing studies.
Kazemi, E. (2002). Exploring test performance in mathematics: The questions children’s answers raise. Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 21, 203-224.
Understanding children’s experiences across mathematics and literacy
My work in mathematics classrooms and with elementary teachers begs questions about children’s experiences across subject matter domains. Because elementary teachers are typically responsible for the entire curriculum, it has become important to me to connect teacher and student experiences across subject domains. To get at this, I undertook a two-year ethnographic study of an upper elementary classroom with a colleague in literacy, Elizabeth Dutro, and a public school teacher, Ruth Balf. Funded by a Royalty Research grant, this study examined how children are intellectually and socially positioned in the classroom across the subject areas of mathematics and literacy. We also examined questions about children’s competence and what is learned by examining their participation in classroom activities versus their performance on formal measures of achievement. The participating classroom was in an urban district and served racially and linguistically diverse children, including children who are often labeled “at risk” of failure in both of these subject areas. One of our goals in this project was to explore the resources that children bring to their work across these subject areas. This project has allowed me to continue to ask questions about mathematics instruction, while also broadening the focus of questions to include children’s multiple identities and how those “ways of being” in classrooms impact children’s success in school, both academically and socially.
Dutro, E., Kazemi, E., & Balf, R. (in press). Making Sense of “The Boy Who Died”: Tales of a struggling successful writer. Reading and Writing Quarterly.
Dutro, E., Kazemi, E., Balf, R. (in press).The aftermath of ‘you’re only half’: Multiracial identities in the literacy classroom. Language Arts.
Dutro, E., Kazemi, E., Lin, Y. & Balf, R. (under review). “What are you and where are you from?”: Culturally relevant pedagogy as identity work in a diverse urban classroom. American Educational Research Journal.
