Ilana Seidel Horn

Vanderbilt University | Vander Bilt · Department of Teaching and Learning

In this article we ask how concepts that organize work in two professional disciplines change during moments of consultation, which represent concerted efforts by participants to work differently now and in the future. Our analysis compares structures of talk, the adequacy of representations of practice, and epistemic and moral stances deployed whe...

The authors investigate how conversational routines, or the practices by which groups structure work-related talk, function in teacher professional communities to forge, sustain, and support learning and improvement. Audiotaped and videotaped records of teachers’ work group interactions, supplemented by interviews and material artifacts, were colle...

This article examines the social nature of teachers' conceptions by showing how teachers frame the "mismatch" of students' perceived abilities and the intended school curriculum through conversational category systems. This study compares the conversations of 2 groups of high school mathematics teachers addressing the Mismatch Problem when implemen...

Just like their students, teachers face mental health struggles in their classrooms. Many of them must learn to cope with teacher-facing trauma while balancing students’ needs and commitment to teaching, which is emotionally exhausting. Authors Christine E. Hood, Ilana Horn, Katherine Schneeberger McGugan, Karen Underwood, Jessica Smith, and Brette...

This international collection of papers examines the many ways teachers exercise agency in light of the challenging realities they and their students face to create caring, engaging and transformative learning environments. The teachers in these studies exercise agency in various ways-as individuals, collectives, and fluid inter-professional and pe...

We investigate the role of teachers' edge-emotions in coaching conversations. While emotions are common in instructional coaching, they are under-examined in research. This qualitative study examines a particularly emotional coaching event that we facilitated with an experienced mathematics teacher. We use Kerdeman's (2003) framework of being "pull...

How do teachers account for homework-related inequalities? Our longitudinal ethnographic study reveals that, despite awareness of structural inequalities in their students’ lives, elementary- and middle-school teachers’ practices centeredcthe myth of meritocracy. They treat struggles with math homework as products of students’ and (particularly in...

Education researchers have long wrestled with the interplay of oppressive structures and individual agency in reproducing, sustaining, and contesting marginalization. In this article, we suggest that Weis and Fine’s construct of critical bifocality may assist researchers in understanding and addressing marginalization in mathematics education. We c...

We build on mathematicians' descriptions of their work and conceptualize mathematics as an aesthetic endeavor. Invoking the anthropological meaning of practice, we claim that mathematical aesthetic practices shape meanings of and appreciation (or distaste) for particular manifestations of mathematics. To see learners' spontaneous mathematical aesth...

Preface Schools exert powerful forces on people's lives. As society's formal setting for learning, schools-or, more precisely, the people in authority there-certify the learning of the next generation. Contradictions between learning and the bureaucratized systems of schooling are particularly keen in mathematics classrooms, where students are cons...

Cultural myths about mathematics as a set of known facts pose unique obstacles for inquiry instruction. What is there to discover if everything is already known? At the same time, decades of mathematics education research shows the potential for inquiry instruction to broaden participation in the discipline. Taking a classroom ecology perspective,...

Calls to increase diversity in the United States teacher workforce emphasize benefits to students without strategic con- sideration of minoritized teachers’ needs. In this ethnographic study, we investigate the affordances of a counterspace for Black women pre-service teachers in a predominantly white institu- tion to support their development as e...

Practices like ability grouping, tracking, and standardized testing operate as status-reinforcing processes-amplifying then naturalizing unequal student outcomes. Using a longitudinal, ethnographic study following students from elementary to middle school, we examine whether math homework can operate similarly. Because of inequalities in families'...

The global COVID-19 pandemic disrupted education across the globe, requiring a quick re-organization of instruction on a large scale. In this study, we examine how highly-committed secondary mathematics teachers in the U.S. responded as they shifted their instruction online. Building off a four-year research practice partnership, we interviewed 11...

Teacher collaboration is often assumed to support school’s ongoing improvement, but it is unclear how formal learning opportunities in teacher workgroups shape informal ones. In this mixed methods study, we examined 77 teacher collaborative meetings from 24 schools representing 116 teacher pairs. We coupled qualitative analysis of the learning oppo...

In this paper, we offer a framework for teacher monitoring routines—a consequential yet understudied aspect of instruction when teachers oversee students’ working together. Using a comparative case study design, we examine eight lessons of experienced secondary mathematics teachers, identifying common interactional routines that they take up with v...

Teachers’ decisions are often undergirded by their sense of pedagogical responsibility: whom and what they feel beholden to. However, research on teacher sensemaking has rarely examined how teachers reason about their pedagogical responsibilities. The study analysed an emotional conversation among urban mathematics teachers about what they teach ma...

Interactionist analyses of teachers' professional conversations respond to open questions about collaborative mathematics teacher learning in ways that are proximal and relevant to their lived experiences and everyday work. Drawing on situative theories of learning, we analyze partitioned conversational records for evidence of learning. Key finding...

Mathematics teacher educators and mathematics teachers should attend to pedagogical judgment. Sharing results from several studies of secondary mathematics teachers’ workplace learning, I describe how pedagogical judgment offers a productive lens for sharpening teachers’ responses to inevitable pedagogical dilemmas. I argue that well-honed pedagogi...

Background: Long-standing calls to infuse technical language in teaching—what we call the Professional Language Project—have been revived in recent years along with the core practices movement in teacher education. The Professional Language Project has been identified as a desired outcome of research and a potential benefit to teacher education. O...

The article outlines a framework for studying and organizing infrastructure - social, material, and technical - to advance consequential knowledge. To demonstrate the utility of the framework, three examples of innovation in teacher education are presented that involve re-mediating infrastructure to imagine equity-oriented teacher learning. The fir...

The article outlines a framework for studying and organizing infrastructure, social and material to advance consequential knowledge. To demonstrate the utility of the framework, three examples of innovation in teacher education are presented that involve re-mediating infrastructure to imagine equity-oriented teacher learning. The first case focuses...

Reformers are increasingly calling for and adopting practice-based approaches to teacher preparation, with particular emphasis on identifying and centering core practices. In this article, we argue that organizing teacher education around core practices brings its own risks, including the risk of peripheralizing equity and justice. Situating our ar...

It is widely accepted that how teachers identify with the profession influences how they think about teaching. In this chapter, we synthesize two sets of interpretive case studies to theorize the relationship between teacher identity and teacher learning. First, we examine how pre-service and novice teachers’ conceptions of a “good teacher” activat...

This analysis joins together two lines of work: mathematical problem solving and children's construction play as a resource for mathematics learning. Our study is motivated by two observations. First, play has characteristics reminiscent of professional mathematicians' practice. Second, the child-centeredness of play points to possibilities for equ...

In this symposium, we ask what mathematical engagement looks like in the context of play, focusing on contexts designed to support mathematical thinking through open-ended activity, and looking at ages that are traditionally overlooked in studies of play. We heed Dewey’s admonition to look beyond sugar-coating: we do not seek to claim that “play is...

Purpose Though test-based accountability policies seek to redress educational inequities, their underlying theories of action treat inequality as a technical problem rather than a political one: data point educators toward ameliorative actions without forcing them to confront systemic inequities that contribute to achievement disparities. To highli...

Playing and doing mathematics are often conceived of as mutually exclusive activities. One is dominated by positive affect and free choice, while the other is often perceived as highly abstract and predetermined. We wonder how children’s play can provide an entrée into mathematical thinking? In play, children ask “what if…?” as they imagine new pos...

Many school-improvement efforts include time for teacher collaboration, with the assumption that teachers’ collective work supports instructional improvement. However, not all collaboration equally supports learning that would support improvement. As a part of a 5-year study in two urban school districts, we collected video records of more than 100...

Using a learning design perspective on No Child Left Behind (NCLB), I examine how accountability policy shaped urban educators’ instructional sensemaking. Focusing on the role of policy-rooted classifications, I examine conversations from a middle school mathematics teacher team as a “best case” because they worked diligently to comply with the NCL...

The status of teaching as a profession in the United States has changed in the twenty-first century. The landmark accountability legislation No Child Left Behind has challenged efforts to professionalize teaching, pushing it further from semiprofessional status. This article examines issues of teacher certification, the role of professional organiz...

This article describes a situative approach to studying motivation to learn in social contexts. We begin by contrasting this perspective to more prevalent psychological approaches to the study of motivation, describing epistemological and methodological differences that have constrained conversation between theoretical groups. We elaborate on issue...

In the United States, teaching is an isolated profession. At the same time, ambitious forms of teaching have been shown to benefit from teacher collaboration. What is it about collegial conversations that supports teachers’ ongoing professional learning? In this paper, I synthesize findings from prior studies on mathematics teachers’ collaborative...

Increasingly, instructional improvement efforts include teacher communities as part of their overall strategy, yet the relationship between teachers’ talk and professional learning remains underspecified. Using a discourse perspective on learning, this paper compares opportunities to learn (OTLs) in the collaborative conversations of three mathemat...

In the accountability era, educators are pressed to use evidence-based practice. In this comparative case study, we examine the learning opportunities afforded by teachers’ data use conversations. Using situated discourse analysis, we compare two middle school mathematics teacher workgroups interpreting data from the same district assessment. Despi...

A common critique of teacher education centres on the gap between coursework and schools, with ample evidence that novice teachers seldom bring ambitious forms of instruction into classroom placements. We describe a 6-year design experiment conducted in a university teacher education program secondary mathematics methods course focused squarely on...

Using insights from the learning sciences, the four papers in this symposium investigate the ways teachers' collegial talk contributes to their learning about equitable instruction. One pair of papers comes from primarily observational studies, investigating how everyday storytelling and facilitation stand to instantiate or challenge teachers' know...

Alan Schoenfeld uncovered critical aspects of problem solving, identifying the way that learners use resources, heuristics, control, and beliefs to guide their activities around non-standard mathematical problems. In his groundbreaking research, he used talk-aloud protocols during problem solving sessions with undergraduates and audio recorded them...

In this article, our focus is on the methodological issues in taking a situative approach to studying the interconnected development of motivation, identity, and learning in multiple social contexts. We illustrate our description with data acquired from a cross-context, longitudinal, ethnographic study of novice teachers’ learning, motivation, and...

We present a longitudinal study of novice teachers’ appropriation, negotiation, and recontextualization of assessment tools and practices. During the four years of the study, we observed and interviewed beginning mathematics and social studies teachers, along with their colleagues, mentors, and supervisors, from their time in a graduate secondary t...

Background/Context Research shows that teachers’ understandings of students, subject, and teaching influence their classroom practice. Additionally, teachers’ colleagues have a role in shaping individuals’ approaches to teaching and their responses to reform. Focus of Study To understand how interactions with colleagues support teachers’ informal...

This analysis joins together two lines of work: research on students' mathematical identities and on curricular organization that supports equitable academic outcomes. This article conceptualizes students' sense of mathematical competence as emerging through the interaction between their extant identities and the mathematical worlds they encounter...

ABSTRACT Preservice teachers (interns) are motivated to learn and take up teaching practices that appear useful to them in becoming good teachers. In this paper, we argue that judgments about which practices to take up are made on the basis of motivational filters employed,in social contexts by interns as part of self-regulated learning. These filt...

Students' mastery of and achievement in high school mathematics is considered pivotal to their opportunities for and within postsecondary education. For this reason, many educators have attempted to implement equity-geared reforms, including detracking, that affect the organization and instruction of high school mathematics. This article describes...

To investigate teachers' everyday on-the-job learning, I used a comparative case study design and examined the work of mathematics teachers in 2 high schools. Analysis of interviews, classroom observations, and teachers' conversations high-lighted 3 key resources for learning: (a) reform artifacts oriented the teachers' atten-tion to key concepts o...

Students, especially black, Latino and Native American youth and students of low socio-economic status drop out of advanced mathematics. Teachers must coordinate their expectations, their knowledge of students and their teaching practices in order to stop struggling students from dropping out of advanced math classes.

Recent emphasis on discourse in mathematics classrooms has spurred a line of inquiry about different forms of talk in these settings. If mathematical thinking is understood to be a set of practices that includes mathematical discourse, argumentation, which has an especially important role in mathematics, requires analytic attention. In particular,...

This report investigates professional knowledge and learning demands associated with high school reform initiatives, and corresponding opportunities for teacher development, emphasizing literacy and mathematics. It examines how teachers' learning in selected reform-specific areas is facilitated or impeded by internal school features and by the natu...

This report, which is directed toward policymakers, educators, employers, researchers, and others interested in the school-to-work (STW) movement, synthesizes literature on the development and effectiveness of STW programs since 1993. Part I provides an overview of the STW movement and examines the effectiveness of STW efforts in terms of available...