Since shifting from a career as a classroom teacher to a university faculty member preparing future teachers, Assistant Professor Naomi Jessup has had opportunities to network with several early-career faculty members at other institutions.
In 2019, Jessup connected with six mathematics education colleagues from other universities around a common goal: To improve how they taught teacher education students to develop equity-based teaching practices.
These seven faculty members formed a critical friendship group to provide opportunities for being vulnerable about their teaching experiences, reflecting on how to improve their practices and looking at their work with a critical eye.
In an article published in Studying Teacher Education, Jessup and her colleagues described the group’s experiences over one academic year and what they learned from one another.
The group began by incorporating a specific piece of published research into their fall semester elementary mathematics education courses. The research article outlined five strategies that teachers can use to recognize students’ mathematical strengths, and Jessup and her colleagues asked their undergraduate students to read it and discuss it in class. Students also wrote reflections at the end of the semester about how they incorporated the article’s five strategies into their work.
The critical friendship group met monthly during the academic year, where they engaged in conversations about using this article in their work, defining equity and strengths-based teaching practices, asking questions about each other’s teaching methods and made changes to how they taught the research article used in the fall.
Jessup and her colleagues found that the critical friendship group provided a much-needed professional development opportunity and a point of connection among mathematics teacher educators working toward a similar goal.
“One consistent aim among our collaborative is that we reflect on and dialogue about the complexity of our work as mathematics teacher educators,” they wrote. “We continue to engage in and unfold our critical friendship, supportively pushing each other to reflect on our own teaching toward the use of equity-based pedagogies, which is vital for teaching mathematics for equity.”
About the Researcher
Naomi Jessup
Department of Early Childhood and Elementary Education
Assistant Professor Naomi Jessup focuses her research on teacher learning and development related to children’s mathematical thinking of elementary fractions, mathematics teaching practices and curriculum for culturally, linguistically and economically diverse populations. In addition, Jessup’s research focuses on reimagining mathematics education spaces amid and post the COVID-19 pandemic in a way that is rehumanizing and honors the voices, knowledge and contributions of students, parents and their communities, especially those from marginalized communities. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Citation
Baker, K., Ward, J., Nitta, K., Gonzalez, M. L., Smith, E., Jessup, N. A., and Dobie, T. “From Colleagues to Critical Friends: Exploring Avenues of Professional Learning to Support Equity-Based Pedagogies in Mathematics Education.” Studying Teacher Education, July 2023, DOI: 10.1080/17425964.2023.2233329.