Academic Success Skills: Developing Classroom Communities

Feeling a sense of belonging to a community is essential to participating fully in that community’s activities. Engineering the social context of a classroom to foster the establishment of a community in collective pursuit of the joint enterprise of learning mathematics through inquiry is a complex and difficult process, and for this reason is often ignored or neglected. However, the potential affordances of developing such communities are significant. It is therefore a goal of entry-level mathematics to cultivate communities of mathematics learners that establish the social, cognitive, and affective conditions for students to engage in mathematical inquiry to develop productive conceptions of course content.

Faculty at the MIP Academic Success Skills Initiation Workshop in May, 2019 recommended that instructional resources developed by CoRDs and ARCs addressing Developing Classroom Communities for success in the Oklahoma entry-level college math pathways should:

1. Identify the essential characteristics of classroom communities that promote students’ learning by inquiry and describe how these characteristics relate to the mindsets, identities, and beliefs of individual participants of the classroom community.

2. Describe how an instructor might establish a classroom community through particular course management, instruction, and assessment practices that embody the characteristics identified in response to (1).

3. Articulate the features of a mathematics curriculum that might promote the establishment of a classroom community that embodies the characteristics identified in response to (1).

4. Describe the potential affordances of the MIP focus on promoting students’ active engagement and leveraging meaningful applications for establishing a classroom community that is supportive of students’ conceptual learning.

Suggested Resources

Frey, N., Fisher, D., Everlove, S. (2009). Productive group work: how to engage students, build teamwork, and promote understanding. Alexandria, VA.

This is a comprehensive resource that presents strategies for a teacher’s effective implementation of group work. The authors identify the essential features of impactful group work and describe how to promote productive face-to-face interaction, ensure individual accountability, and build interpersonal skills. Although the authors’ recommendations are not situated in a mathematics learning context exclusively, the suggestions they propose are relevant to focus (2) above.

Goos, M., Galbraith, P., & Renshaw, P. (2003). Establishing a community of practice in a secondary mathematics classroom. In Mathematics Education (pp. 101-126). Routledge.

Goos et al. describe how to establish a classroom community that embraces the practices, values, and beliefs of the mathematics community at large. They present the case of an upper secondary mathematics classroom to highlight the roles that teachers and students must assume for such a community to develop, and interpret such roles through the lens of social learning theory and Vygotskyian social constructivism.

Goos, M. (2004). Learning mathematics in a classroom community of inquiry. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 258-291.

In this research article, Goos leverages sociocultural theories of learning in general, and the notion of zone of proximal development in particular, to identify how a teacher established norms and practices that contributed to the cultivation a community of inquiry in a secondary mathematics classroom. This resource is most relevant to addressing foci (1), (2), and (4) above.

Sherin, M. G. (2002). A balancing act: Developing a discourse community in a mathematics classroom. Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 5(3), 205-233.

In this research article, Sherin explores the tensions a secondary teacher experienced while attempting to use students’ mathematical ideas as the basis of his instruction to achieve particular content objectives. In doing so, Sherin identifies specific discursive strategies the teacher employed to harmonize his commitment to fostering a student-centered classroom community with his intention to promote students’ construction of significant mathematical understandings. This resource is most relevant to addressing foci (1), (2), and (4) above.

Sherin, M. G., Mendez, E. P., & Louis, D. A. (2004). A discipline apart: the challenges of ‘Fostering a Community of Learners’ in a mathematics classroom. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 36(2), 207-232.

Sherin et al. examine the dialectic between the pedagogical approach of fostering a community of learners and an instructor’s goals for students’ mathematical learning. Sherin et al. argue that effectively establishing a community of learners requires a teacher to reconceptualize her instruction in relation to the content of the subject-matter. This resource is most relevant to foci (2), (3), and (4) above.