Lesson Play tasks as a creative venture for teachers and teacher educators (original) (raw)

This study focuses on instances of creativity in the design of Lesson Play tasks and in prospective teachers’ responses to the tasks. A Lesson Play task assumes a theatrical interpretation of the word ‘play’ and requires teachers to write a script for an imaginary interaction between a teacher-character and student-characters, attending to a particular instructional situation. These instructional interactions are triggered by ‘prompts’ that present an unexpected student claim, or a particular erroneous conclusion or reasoning. I present a brief overview of the various iterations of task development. I then demonstrate instances of creativity in the design of Lesson Play tasks by teacher educators and in responses to the various prompts in the tasks by prospective teachers. The prompts for the plays and teachers’ responses to the tasks are analysed using an extension of Lev-Zamir and Leikin’s model of Creativity in Mathematics Teaching. While the original model attends to teacher-directed creativity and student-directed creativity, the proposed extension attends to mathematics educators in the role of teachers, and teachers in the role of students. I illustrate cases of pedagogical flexibility and originality as well as of mathematical creativity and originality, noting that multiple facets of creativity can be recognized in particular instructional choices. I conclude that Lesson Play tasks present a fruitful avenue for displaying and supporting teachers’ creativity.

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

Mathematics

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 t...

AN EXAMPLE OF PREPARED-PLANNED CREATIVE DRAMA IN SECOND GRADE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION

The aim of this research is teaching addition with natural numbers and the concept of large and small natural numbers in the second grade mathematics course, through creative drama method. The study has been applied to 31 elementary school second grade students studying at a public school in the province of Aydın. In this research, case study based on observation method, which is one of the qualitative research methods, has been employed. The data have been collected through drama lesson plans, observation, and interview methods. The activities involving the acquisitions of ''adding two-digit natural numbers'' and ''absorbing large-small concepts'' prepared by the researcher, have been applied in the classroom. The drawings of students, literary notes, and observation reports kept by researchers have been used in the evaluation of the activity. As a result of this application, students' views towards the questions covering the whole application have been gathered. The results of the study suggest that prepared-planned creative drama activities are an entertaining and enjoyable way for students to learn. The notes taken by the participative observers and findings obtained from the interviews indicate that drama activities increase sharing among students and that the students could associate what they have learned with some of the situations they encounter in their every day-life. It is observed that the students learn by having more fun while playing games, which involves a high amount of physical movements. Drawing the attention of students through instructions in the warm-up phase of the activity increased students' curiosity in learning. In the animation phase of the activity, it was observed that the students' interest in the mathematics increased, they had fun while making the mathematical operations, their participation to the lesson was high throughout the activity, the energy they received from the lesson was at the maximum level, they learned by doing and living, and they obtained an experience they could use in their every day-life. In the evaluation phase of the activity, the students were asked to describe how they felt by drawing a picture or writing a story as a summary of the creative drama activity they experiences by doing. According to the stories they have written and the pictures they have drawn, it is apparent that they were entertained and happy throughout the activity. The results of this study indicate that the students relieve their mental exhaustion and a relaxed classroom setting is achieved through the relaxation activities.

Characteristics of Creative Mathematics Teachers in Posing Contextual Mathematics Problems

https://www.ijrrjournal.com/IJRR\_Vol.10\_Issue.2\_Feb2023/IJRR-Abstract08.html, 2023

Both teachers and students have carried out various studies on creativity. In general, creativity research is associated with solving mathematical problems. In this research, we want to reveal the characteristics of the creative mathematics teacher subject as another finding in uncovering the stages of the teacher's creative thinking. The results of this study found that creative teachers can observe, ask questions, reason, make analogies and try.

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