Learning to teach ambitiously: a multiple case study of practicing teachers' experimentation with enablers and extenders.

Over the past decade, teaching mathematics ambitiously has received increased attention. In this paper, we argue that to materialize this vision in contemporary classes we need to understand how practicing teachers experiment with certain aspects of this teaching and what challenges they encounter. Toward this end, we focus on an aspect of teaching ambitiously—designing and using enablers and extenders—and examine how four elementary schoolteachers experimented with it in their practice while also participating in a video-club setting. Drawing on a corpus of data including lesson plans, videotaped lessons, pre- and post-lesson interviews, end-of-program interviews, and videotaped video-club sessions, and looking across the four cases, we sketch how these teachers worked with enablers and extenders and the challenges they faced. Our analysis helped identify certain components entailed in working with enablers and extenders during the phases of lesson planning and enactment; it also yielded a classification of observed and reported challenges encountered as teachers engage with this work. This mapping of work associated with designing and using enablers and extenders, along with the classification of challenges generated, can inform professional learning development attempts aiming to support teachers enact ambitious teaching by identifying and naming separate components of practice that merit consideration and by providing insights into the types of scaffolds needed to support teachers in teaching ambitiously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]