NSF Awards: 1908481
Students of color, students learning English as a second language, and students from other underrepresented groups are often underserved in STEM classrooms. However, through instructional improvement, we can work to provide better supports for these students and change some of the common classroom dynamics that result in specific students being pushed to the margins when it comes to participating and excelling in STEM. We invite you to view this video and interact with the VEAR-MI team and others in discussions of how to support equitable participation and access in STEM. Specifically, we encourage you to weigh in on issues such as:
What are some of the “in-classroom” or “in-school” factors that may contribute to the underrepresentation of specific groups in STEM fields and careers?
What teaching practices honor and support students in gaining access, achieving, developing robust identities, and being empowered by/within STEM classrooms?
What do teachers need to know and be able to do in order to adequately and appropriately serve students from culturally diverse backgrounds?
How can we better support our teachers in their efforts to better support their students?
We share from our work with large urban school districts investigating these and other issues. In particular, we present practices from our research in mathematics classrooms that have been linked to improvements in student achievement and increases in student participation. In our work, we have also found that it is not just a matter of whether or not teachers are implementing the practices. Rather, we have discovered that there are key differences in the quality of the implementation of the teaching practices. We are currently developing classroom observation rubrics that could support teachers, researchers, teacher educators, and professional developers in making qualitative distinctions between four different levels of implementation for each practice. In this video, we present a couple of these distinctions for a few of the practices.
The Validation of the Equity and Access Rubrics for Mathematics Instruction (VEAR-MI) project is supported by the National Science Foundation’s Discovery Research PreK-12 program (DRK-12). The DRK-12 program seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering, mathematics and computer science (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of STEM education innovations and approaches.
Join us in discussing ways that we can work together to improve STEM teaching and learning for each and every student.
Jonee Wilson
Assistant Professor
Supporting equitable participation and access has potential to change existing narratives and views on what it looks like to teach and participate in STEM classrooms and what it means to work within the STEM field. However, aiming for equity involves identifying and outlining specific practices that support and empower students who have historically been underserved specifically in mathematics classrooms. This video is about the work we are currently doing to name such practices concretely and to develop an observational tool. This tool has great potential and could be used a.) to structure discussions about equitable instruction in the context of professional development for educators, b.) to provide feedback to instructors as they work to implement the practices in their classrooms, or c.) as a measurement of instructional quality for researchers interested in doing large- and small-scale studies.
We’d love to hear what you think about the following:
What changes to the current educational system are needed to support equitable participation and access in STEM? What are some of the more immediate things that educators can do in their classrooms to support the goals of providing equitable STEM education for all?
We welcome your insights, comments, questions, stories and experiences related to these and other questions. We encourage students, parents, policy makers, funders, researchers, administrators, and especially teachers to share their perspectives!
James Callahan
Danielle Moloney
DeLene Hoffner
Lead Teacher
I really enjoyed your video and project. What were the most profound lessons you learned through your work?
James Callahan
Danielle Moloney
Danielle Moloney
Graduate Student
Thanks for your interest, DeLene! I think one of the greatest insights we’ve learned through this project is that teachers can naturally embed these eleven practices into their classrooms. Supporting equitable participation does not require a complete overhaul of instructional methods, but it does require intentionality. Our hope is that these observational rubrics can be used to support teachers as they make shifts in their practices in order to ensure access for all students.
DeLene Hoffner
Lead Teacher
Thank you! I'm so glad it blends into the classroom without too much extra for the teacher. Thank you for your reponse. DeLene
Calli Shekell
I enjoyed the examples you gave of practices teachers can use to support equitable participation. I know you're developing an observation rubric, but have you done any work with teachers around the practices identified in your rubric?
Danielle Moloney
Danielle Moloney
Graduate Student
We appreciate your feedback, Calli! We have shared some of these practices with teachers at professional conferences. Teachers are often particularly interested in supporting connections and engagement between student context and the learning environment. With this practice, teachers make connections to students’ lives outside of class in a way that brings the content to life and draws students into the conversation. We hope to continue working with educators as we move forward with this project and finalize the observational rubrics.
Jonee Wilson
Assistant Professor
Hey Calli! To add to Danielle's great response, we have also used the rubrics in the context of teacher education course work and professional development. What I have found is that, in both the course and PD, the rubrics were helpful in a.) framing discussions around classroom instruction that we viewed together, b.) providing language to support teachers in talking about instruction during our discussions, and c.) in supporting structured reflections on their own instruction.
Thanks for your support Calli :)
Danielle Moloney
Calli Shekell
Thanks Jonee and Danielle for your responses. I like how you talked about the rubric equipping teachers with language to talk about instruction in equitable ways. The non-examples and examples in your video seemed like a great representations to learn from as well.
Danielle Moloney
Paola Sztajn
This is a great video and I really like the description of the practices. So much information that can support equitable instruction. Thanks for sharins.
Danielle Moloney
Danielle Moloney
Graduate Student
Thanks for watching, Paola! We appreciate your support.
Jonee Wilson
Assistant Professor
Yes, thank you for the support Paola!
Caroline Ebby
I'm very interested in this work and I think it will make a real contribution to the field. In addition to being a useful tool for research, it seems like it could be a very useful self-assessment and coaching tool for both preservice and inservice teachers. Are you looking for projects to pilot? When do you anticipate making the tool available?
Danielle Moloney
Danielle Moloney
Graduate Student
Thank you so much! Yes, we agree that it could be useful for self-assessment and as a coaching tool! We are currently working to validate the tool but would be interested in piloting this type of work in the near future. Please contact us at vearmiproject@ncsu.edu. We'd love to hear more!
Caroline Ebby
Sarah Carrier
I enjoyed this video and the work described here. These kinds of supports to help teachers in their interactions with students offer such opportunities for both students and their teachers. Nice work!
Danielle Moloney
Jonee Wilson
Assistant Professor
Thanks for the support Sarah!
Danielle Moloney
Graduate Student
Thanks Sarah! We certainly aim to support both teachers and students through this work
Valerie Faulkner
Such awesome stuff. Perhaps teaching with kindness can be learned and taught? I am really struck by the eloquence of the framing. For instance, approaching with Curiosity. That is such a beautiful way to positively frame the behavior--and it is actionable. I am looking forward to using your work with my pre-service teachers.
Kimberly Elliott
Annie Wilhelm
Danielle Moloney
Jonee Wilson
Assistant Professor
Thank you Valerie! Yes, I think you are hitting on an important point, that teaching with kindness or "humanity" can to some extent be taught and developed (or at least we are thinking about our practices as a good starting point). Looking forward to talking more with you about how this work can be used with pre-service teachers.
Danielle Moloney
Jessica Hunt
What a wonderful way to illustrate intentionality in terms of how we interact with students and how naturally asset based framing can be put into practice in the classroom. Bravo!
Kimberly Elliott
Danielle Moloney
Anya Goodman
Jonee Wilson
Assistant Professor
Yes, Jessica! Well said! Asset based instructional practices can be organically incorporated into the classroom and when approached with intentionality, it can be developed by teachers. Thank you :)
Kimberly Elliott
Danielle Moloney
Jessica Hunt
Myriam Steinback
Independent Consultant
Lovely focus and support for both teachers and students. Your descriptions and illustrations of curiosity, language, and open-ended questions as practices teachers need to learn and use are key to equitable classrooms. Kudos!
Jonee Wilson
Danielle Moloney
Danielle Moloney
Graduate Student
Myriam, thanks for your comments! We certainly agree that all these skills are critical to equitable instruction and we hope to continue supporting teachers as they grow in these practices.
Jonee Wilson
Myriam Steinback
Daniel Heck
Hello VEAR-MI team--thanks for sharing your work. Providing framing, language, and tools that are useful in both research and practice is so important for improving learning environments. Your examples show how the teaching perspectives and moves you've identified can powerfully reshape the learning environment to promote equitable opportunities. I'm curious to know if you've seen evidence of students taking up similar perspectives and moves in their interactions with teachers and peers.
Elena Ortiz
Jonee Wilson
Danielle Moloney
Graduate Student
Thanks for your interest, Daniel! One of the key differences in many of these practices is how teachers involve students in the process of learning. For example, one of the practices examines how teachers attend to math language in the classroom. We look at how teachers involve students in the defining of math terms and how the students build on each others’ thinking in order to come to a shared definition of the vocabulary. We have seen examples of classroom communities where students have learned to actively listen and add on to one another’s ideas.
Jonee Wilson
Daniel Heck
Jonee Wilson
Assistant Professor
Yes, thank you Daniel! To add on to Danielle, we have also observed instances where the teacher directly encourages students to take up some of these practices. For example, we have seen lessons where the teacher prompts students to position each other as competent (another practice from our work). We have also seen teachers encouraging students to promote a nurturing environment by reminding each other about classroom norms and values.
Josie Melton
Post-Doctoral Researcher and Senior Instructor
I agree with others that the rubric and examples/non-examples are great tools to guide pre- and in-service teachers. I think that it is sometimes difficult to self-assess what needs improvement when there are positive intentions, but these concrete examples clearly identify shifts in the way teachers can communicate that may have great impacts on students. Do you know when the tools will be available?
Thanks for sharing!
Elena Ortiz
Jonee Wilson
Jonee Wilson
Assistant Professor
Thank you Josie! To add to the great response that Elizabeth Adams made (thanks Beth :), we have also been thinking about what (if anything) in the current form of the tools may need to be altered to account for different audiences (e.g. researchers vs teachers; in-service versus pre-service teachers; etc.). We would love to talk more with you about this! Please email us at the address included in Beth's comment.
Josie Melton
Elizabeth Adams
STEM Evaluation Researcher
Hi Josie, thank you so much for your interest in our project. We agree that the concrete examples and non-examples are valuable to helping teachers actually promote equity and access in their classrooms in observable ways. We are currently collecting evidence of validity to support the use of the rubrics. At this stage, this includes a generalizability study to establish how many coders and videos are necessary to obtain consistent scores for teachers. Moving forward, we will examine relations to other variables and other sources of evidence based on the AERA/NCME/APA test standards. It's hard to anticipate when the evidence will be sufficient to support its use more widely; we would love to keep in touch and share more after we analyze the generalizability study data. Please email us at vearmiproject@ncsu.edu if you would like!
Jonee Wilson
Josie Melton
Post-Doctoral Researcher and Senior Instructor
Hi Jonee and Elizabeth, I am interested in tools to use with preservice teachers and appreciate your offer to share resources in the future. Thank you for your responses!
Jonee Wilson
Assistant Professor
Yes! Let's keep each other posted...thanks again for your interest in this work :)
Lindsay Palmer
I enjoyed hearing about your work! It so important to consider teaching practices as well as supporting teachers in order to create more inclusive academic environments. Great work!
Elena Ortiz
Jonee Wilson
Assistant Professor
Thank you Lindsay! We agree and we are excited about the prospects of making the work of supporting teachers in developing these practices very practical through these rubrics.
Heather Howell
Really interesting and inspiring work. Its such hard work to create and think through and validate rubrics, and they are so helpful for making things visible in different ways. I'm curious what you've done, in practical terms, with the rubrics so far - have they mostly been used by observers or coaches to make judgments, by the teachers themselves to support reflection, and have you produced supports that help teachers to know, once the rubric helps them notice an issue, what actionable steps would help them improve?
Jonee Wilson
Temple Walkowiak
Associate Professor, Mathematics Education
Hi Heather! Thank you for checking out our work. The rubrics have been used by raters/coders as we work on collecting evidence of validity of the rubrics. Also, Dr. Jonee Wilson, PI, has used the rubrics in pre-service teacher education and professional development settings. In both settings, she has found that the EAR-MI rubrics are helpful in: framing discussions around videos of classroom instruction that are viewed together; providing language to support teachers in talking about instruction; and supporting structured reflections on their own instruction. I love your idea of developing actionable steps a teacher can take -- these actionable steps can definitely be drawn from the rubrics. But, as we move forward beyond the validation study, we appreciate your idea because we can make the actionable steps more explicit for practitioner use. We are excited about the rubrics' potential as a tool for teachers, teacher leaders, and teacher educators. Thanks again, Heather.
Jonee Wilson
DeLene Hoffner
Lead Teacher
Bravo to all for this wonderful discussion! Thank you for viewing and adding your questions and expertise. Please share the STEM Showcase with others so they can participate in the discussion too. Let's get more educators involved in viewing these top projects. Voting and discussion ends on May 18th at 8PM EDT. (but viewing is open anytime) https://stemforall2021.videohall.com/
For presenters, what are your next steps going forward?
Jonee Wilson
Temple Walkowiak
Associate Professor, Mathematics Education
Thank you, DeLene! We are really enjoying the showcase and learning about other projects. We've been sharing on social media and with our networks and will continue to do so. :-)
Our most immediate next step for the project is a generalizability study to determine how many coders and videos are necessary to obtain reliable scores on the EAR-MI rubrics. We will also examine relations to other variables and other sources of validity evidence based on the AERA/NCME/APA standards. We are excited about the rubrics' potential as a tool for both researchers and practitioners. Thank you for checking out our work!
Jonee Wilson
Charlotte Sharpe
I appreciate the concrete examples given, and the dialogue 'snippets.' I think this would be a great 'primer' to open a conversation with my PSTs!
Jonee Wilson
Temple Walkowiak
Associate Professor, Mathematics Education
Thank you, Charlotte! We appreciate you checking out our work. Please stay in touch with us if you try out some of the dialogue 'snippets' with your PSTs. vearmiproject@ncsu.edu
Jonee Wilson
Jonee Wilson
Assistant Professor
Hey Charlotte!!! Thanks for the support :) Let us know if you want to think more concretely about ways to use the rubrics in the context of course work with pre-service teachers!
Jill McGowan
I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to hear more about the work two of my classmates are involved in. We don't often talk about the research projects we are a part of, but we should definitely do more of that!
I enjoyed your video and learning about your project's potential implications for teacher implementation in the classrooms. In particular, the examples given were a great visual for how a teacher could respond to students, rather than react. These would have been very useful to me when I was teaching. Simple examples with HUGE impact!
Danielle Moloney
Jonee Wilson
Temple Walkowiak
Associate Professor, Mathematics Education
Thank you, Jill! I agree that it's so interesting and fun to check out each other's work. (I really enjoyed your project's video, too). Thank you for your comments and for checking out our video.
Jonee Wilson
Natalia Yanez Castillo
Graduate Student/Research Assistant
Hi Jill! Thank you for checking our work! I agree with you that it is so important to share our research projects. As you mentioned, it is our goal for these rubrics to become a tool teachers in the classroom and researchers can use to constantly assess instructional practices to benefit students and provide more equitable learning experiences. Thanks again, Jill
Jonee Wilson
Danielle Scharen
This is incredible work and such an important topic. I'm excited to learn more about supporting equitable participation and access in STEM classrooms!
In response to Dr. Wilson's questions:
Many changes are necessary but teacher preparation and ongoing teacher education in these areas are a must. More immediately, educators can seek out current research-based practices and learn about the purpose behind these practices, and begin to implement those practices in their teaching right away.
Danielle Moloney
Jonee Wilson
Elizabeth Adams
STEM Evaluation Researcher
Hi Danielle, thank you so much for watching and commenting on our video. We agree with you that it is very important that teachers (and the raters who use the rubrics) understand the purpose behind each of the practices or rubrics. Each of our 11 rubrics reflects a distinct practice, and we often refer to the purpose or big idea behind each rubric as the "spirit of the rubric" during training. We are really excited to see so much interest in these rubrics as a way to support teachers' use of practices that encourage equity and access.
Jonee Wilson
Jonee Wilson
Assistant Professor
Hey Danielle! Thank you for supporting us :)
I completely agree...teacher education is key. I think one of the challenges for teacher educators is finding ways to practically make connections between research and practice. One of the great things about our rubrics is that they very concretely describe some of the concepts that are discussed in theory and they could be used in thinking through tangible next steps for teachers who desire to improve or develop specific practices.
Thanks again!
Rita Hagevik
Yes we need to make sure all student voices are included! Teacher behaviors are so important. Teachers need to be acceptable and supportive of all students. Great project!
Jonee Wilson
Elizabeth Adams
STEM Evaluation Researcher
Hi Rita. We hope that these rubrics help teachers see how they can encourage students who are often marginalized to see themselves as important contributors in mathematics classrooms in concrete and observable ways. We're glad you see our work as a contribution to the field. Thank you!
Jonee Wilson
Anne Whitver
This is life-changing, world-changing work!
Jonee Wilson
Jonee Wilson
Assistant Professor
Hey Anne!!!! Thank you, I appreciate your support :)
Myriam Steinback
Independent Consultant
I'm wondering whether among the wonderful practices that you described, you also include teachers keeping track of who they call on when students share... we've seen teachers asking one or more students to keep track and the data is illuminating.
Jonee Wilson
Jonee Wilson
Assistant Professor
Hey Myriam, thank you for this question! We have been thinking about doing something like this- for example, we have a rubric about "Positioning Students as Competent" and we think it may be illuminating to use that rubric alongside demographic information (i.e. asking questions about who gets positioned and how are they positioned).
Lindsay Goldsmith-Markey
Great video! As others have mentioned--the concrete examples really help me to understand the flavor and texture of your rubrics (and I'm so excited to read about the rest of the 11 practices). The specific examples of practices that you offered in the video speak loudly and clearly to me as vital work in the mathematics classroom. I'm curious about how you identified and defined the 11 practices and their dimensions (for lack of a better term). I'm sure that's a whole paper in itself, but I'd love to know even just a little bit about how they came about. Thanks for sharing your work with us!
Jonee Wilson
Annie Wilhelm
Associate Professor
Hi Lindsay, Great question! Thankfully we have already written a paper about this so we can send you there for more details:
Wilson, J., Nazemi, M., Jackson, K., & Wilhelm, A. G. (2019). Investigating teaching in conceptually oriented mathematics classrooms characterized by African American student success. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 50(4), 362-400.
The short answer is that we examined a sample of classrooms implementing conceptually-oriented instruction and compared two sub-samples that differed on whether African American students in class performed better than predicted by their previous state assessment scores. The practices were identified through qualitative analysis of the classrooms where African American students performed better, and found to be much less common in classrooms where African American students were not as successful.
Thanks for asking!
Jonee Wilson
Lindsay Goldsmith-Markey
Ah! Excellent. Thank you--both for the summary, and the reference. I'm looking forward to reading the paper!
Jonee Wilson
Rita Hagevik
Michelle Lesperance
What an incredible gift you are providing to students. This is what teaching is all about, so proud of all of you for researching what works!
Danielle Moloney
Rita Hagevik
Jonee Wilson
Assistant Professor
Thank you Michelle! One of the benefits of the rubrics is being able to share what works and what we are finding in our research with teachers in very practical and concrete ways :)
Danielle Moloney
Graduate Student
Thanks for your support of both teachers and students!!
Rita Hagevik
Great project and yes we do need to support all students and meet them where they are at themselves.
Jonee Wilson
Assistant Professor
Thank you Rita, we are hoping to be able to help teachers in doing just that by providing examples of concrete practices that they can implement in their classrooms!
Anita Crowder
Thank you for your video and this work. As a former engineer (and often the "only" when I was in college), I am so passionate about this topic. I believe this rubric will be useful across content areas, not just mathematics. I look forward to following this study!
Jonee Wilson
Annie Wilhelm
Associate Professor
Yes! Thank you! We are very interested in thinking about which of the rubrics might directly "translate into other content area classrooms and which might need a bit of adjustment. There are some that focus on mathematics, for example, math expectations or math coaching, and those might require a bit of broadening to work across content area boundaries, but we are excited to keep thinking about that!
Jonee Wilson
Candice Woods
Thank you so much for doing this important work! Have you thought about how your rubric might be adapted to fit for an informal education audience?
Jonee Wilson
Annie Wilhelm
Associate Professor
Thank you! That's a good question. To my knowledge, we've thought more about adapting across content areas than into informal education spaces, but it would be interesting to think about what that might look like. Do you have ideas about what might need to change and what might stay the same?
Jonee Wilson
Sarah Carrier
I agree that this is a gift to teachers and their students. The rubrics establish important practices for addressing issues of equity in STEM instruction. Excellent work.
Jonee Wilson
Annie Wilhelm
Associate Professor
Thank you very much!
Jonee Wilson
Assistant Professor
Thank you for your support Sarah!!!
Lawanda Cummings
I love this!! In our work through the Virgin Island Institute for STEM Education Research and Practice, we work with teachers from all three islands in the USVI. We have been supporting teachers in developing Project Based Lessons (PBLs) that reflect the local context and culture. I am excited about the strategies discussed in the video as they can direct application to our minority-majority schools that have struggled with student performance. I hope to connect you with the director of the STEM Institute, Dr. Nadia Monrose Mills, who works directly with the teachers. These strategies and rubric seem like they could enrich that PD program greatly.
Jonee Wilson
Jonee Wilson
Assistant Professor
Thank you Lawanda! To add to Anna's great response (thank you Anna :), it is awesome that you are supporting teachers in thinking through how to develop lessons and activities that reflect the local culture! Connecting with you all has great potential to add an additional layer to the work we are doing (many of the teacher participants from our project use inquiry-oriented curricula but a lot of the scenarios presented in the activities do not reflect the students' lives/community).
We are looking forward to connecting with you!!!
Anna Thorp
Project Manager
Thank you, Lawanda! It sounds like you are involved in very interesting work. We'd love for you to connect us with Dr. Nadia Monrose Mills. Our email address is vearmiproject@ncsu.edu. We're grateful for your idea to connect our groups--I'm confident that we could learn a lot from the work going on at the Virgin Island Institute for STEM Education Research and Practice!
Jonee Wilson
James Callahan
Thank you. One of my very favorite videos this year! Especially from the perspective of the videos that taught ME a great deal.. Very enjoyable.
This very much aligns with our approach to education. Very learner driven. Multilingual and with very diverse teams of educators. Exploring, discovering. Encouraging students to discover the answers for themselves, rather than educators "giving them" the answers. Yet guiding, encouraging, fun opportunities.
The way you approach things very much has deepened how I look at education. Thank you!
Jonee Wilson
James Callahan
Jonee Wilson
Assistant Professor
Thank you James! We hope that the rubrics can be used to support other educators in rethinking how they approach instruction and may even improve in-classroom interactions particularly for students who are typically underserved. We appreciate your support!
Adrienne Smith
Thank you for sharing. This work fits nicely with a need we have noticed working with teachers who are looking to incorporate more student dialogue into their math classrooms. As teachers begin incorporating deeper conceptual problems and allowing students to grapple, they often struggle with their new role. This video provides some concrete ways (e.g., focusing on curiosity, highlighting resources, encouraging dialogue in any language) to interact with students to support their growth. Thank you and good luck in your validation efforts!
Jonee Wilson
Danielle Moloney
Danielle Moloney
Graduate Student
Thanks Adrienne! The work of shifting to student-centered instruction and student discourse requires intentional support for teachers. We hope that these practices offer teachers actionable steps that can be used to build equitable participation in math classrooms.
Jonee Wilson
Rebecca Mickey
Great support for both the students and teachers. Thanks for sharing.
Jonee Wilson
Anna Thorp
Project Manager
Thank you so much, Rebecca! We're very much looking forward to sharing these resources with teachers so that just as you said, we can support teachers and students in all the teaching and learning that they do every day. That is the ultimate goal!
Jonee Wilson
Assistant Professor
Thank you for your support! It means a lot that you find this helpful :)