Pedagogical listening: understanding how teachers listen to student struggle during mathematical sense-making discussions

Abstract

Research suggests that students’ verbalisation of how they are struggling to understand something new is important for learning mathematics with conceptual understanding. However, less is known about how teachers listen while students ‘think aloud’ through struggle. In this study, we sought to answer the following research question: What types of listening do teachers enact when students are verbalising struggle during mathematical sense-making discussions? We detail how we created and applied a Framework for Pedagogical Listening, which extends previous theoretical and empirical research on teacher listening to identify and differentiate between five types of teacher listening: empathic, supportive, educative, self-reflective and generative. Our study involved nine teachers and their students in the US and Scotland, contexts which are focused on reform-efforts towards inquiry-oriented mathematics instruction that engages students in sense-making discussions. Our findings suggest that the five types of teacher listening in our framework are present when students verbalise struggle during sense-making discussions, and that our Pedagogical Listening Framework is a useful tool for identifying and documenting the complex ways teachers listen when students verbalise struggle. We present three vignettes of classroom interaction during mathematical discussion that illustrate the five pedagogical listening types.