Meghan M. Shaughnessy

University of Michigan | U-M · School of Education

This chapter reports on work from a decade-long project to develop and study the use of teaching simulations focused on the teaching practices of eliciting and interpreting student thinking to support preservice teachers' (PSTs') learning. The chapter describes how teaching simulations focused on these practices allow teacher educators to support P...

Mathematics discussions are important for helping students to develop conceptual understanding and to learn disciplinary norms and practices. In recent years, there has been increased attention to teaching prospective teachers to lead discussions with students. This paper examines the possibilities of designing a formative assessment that gathers i...

Interactions around unexpected, incorrect, or dis-preferred responses can be powerful sites of learning for both teachers and students. The information that teachers uncover through probing student thinking can then guide their pedagogical response. We report on a study of prospective teachers’ skills and capabilities around a particular problem of...

As teacher education shifts to focus on teaching beginners to do the work of teaching, assessments need to shift to focus on assessing practice. We focus on one teaching practice, eliciting student thinking, in the context of elementary mathematics. We describe assessments in two contexts (field and simulation). For each assessment, we describe the...

This study is situated within efforts to embrace the challenge of preparing teacher candidates (TCs) for the complexities of teaching mathematics while creating shared opportunities for inquiry across teacher education programs. We developed a shared decomposition of leading mathematics discussions that could be used across our teacher education si...

This chapter focuses on the design of simulation assessments to learn about pre-service teachers’ capabilities with eliciting and interpreting student thinking. We present a simulation assessment and show what a performance on that assessment can reveal about a pre-service teacher’s eliciting and interpreting skills, as well as their mathematical k...

Although teacher education is the formal means by which novices are prepared for teaching, they come having already had significant experience in schools. Preservice teachers have formed habits of “teaching” which influence their learning to teach. This article reports a study of the specific knowledge of and skills with teaching practice that novi...

Two investigations of fifth graders’ strategies for locating whole numbers on number lines revealed patterns in students’ coordination of numeric and linear units. In Study 1, we investigated the effects of context on students’ placements of three numbers on an open number line. For one group (n = 24), the line was presented in a thematic context a...

To examine students' understanding of this core mathematics content, analyze their erroneous strategies.