Preservice Teachers’ Eliciting and Responding to Student Thinking in Lesson Plays

This study presents an analysis of 95 lesson play scripts—hypothetical dialogues between the teacher and a student—written by 32 preservice teachers (PSTs). Writing lesson scripts was part of the assessment design activities to elicit and respond to students’ thinking. The findings present the types and frequencies of teacher talks/moves in fraction-related tasks during a stage of lesson plays, such as launch, active elicitation, and closure. Our analysis indicates a wide range in the number of turns taken by the PSTs, while there is little correlation between the number of turns and effectiveness at eliciting and responding to student thinking. The study also confirmed that some unproductive talk moves were still present in the lesson play context, although the PSTs had plenty of time to craft a script. This study drew implications of PSTs’ prior perceptions, experiences, knowledge, and needs in mathematics teacher education regarding the ways to create learning opportunities for them to elicit and respond to student thinking.

Framing the Problematics of Choice and Legacy: A Reading of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson as a Dilemma Tale

The choice for a particular narrative architecture has been a major concern for the literary writer and to the African American literary writer, the use of African oral literary elements has been a resourceful option. The present study hypothesizes that August Wilson uses the dilemma tale as a narrative architecture in his The Piano Lesson play and argues that this narrative style helps Wilson to frame the dialogic surrounding what legacy is to the African American. The study reveals that tradition is problematic for the African American to conceive. The conclusion is that the dilemma tale type as a narrative style helps to understand that tradition or, legacy is a complex phenomenon for the African American to fathom.