Dilemmas of Discourse-Oriented Teaching in One Middle School Mathematics Classroom

In this article we focus on the middle school mathematics lessons of 1 teacher who has been relatively successful at instituting discourse-oriented teaching in her mathematics classes over a 3-year period. Data include transcripts of videotaped lessons, field notes from observations of those lessons, and interviews with the teacher, all collected as part of documentation efforts for the Quantitative Understanding: Amplifying Student Achievement and Reasoning (QUASAR) project. We describe how the teacher provided both analytic scaffolding (help in structuring mathematical ideas) and social scaffolding (help in establishing norms for social behaviors) for 3 classes of roughly 30 at-risk students. We demonstrate how the teacher provided less analytic scaffolding for her students because of a well-intended focus on social scaffolding. We note occasions on which the classroom returned to a more traditional orientation, in contrast to the reform orientation the teacher worked to develop. We also discuss ways in which this result highlights parallels between current reform efforts and past studies of discovery learning. We hope to contribute to the theoretical discussion of reform and to suggest ways in which implementation efforts might benefit from midcourse adjustments.