Corey Drake

The Importance of Presence: Immigrant Parents’ School Engagement Experiences

The authors have been engaged in research focused on how parents in high-poverty urban communities negotiate understandings and build sustaining relationships with others in school settings. In this article, the authors draw upon ethnographic methodology to report on the stories of three working-class immigrant parents and their efforts to participate in their children’s formal education. Their stories are used as exemplars to illuminate the challenges immigrant parents face as they work to participate in their children’s schooling. In contrasting the three stories, the authors argue that parental engagement needs to be understood through parents’ presence in schooling, regardless of whether that presence is in a formal school space or in more personal, informal spaces, including those created by parents themselves.

Ecologies of Parental Engagement in Urban Education

What we know about parental involvement in schools cuts across two areas: how and why parental involvement is important and the structural barriers that impede parental participation. However, it has been difficult to construct an account of parental involvement, grounded in everyday practice that goes beyond a laundry list of things that good parents do for their children’s education. In this article we make a case for a new data-driven framework for understanding parental engagement in urban elementary schools, the Ecologies of Parental Engagement (EPE) framework. The EPE framework marks a fundamental shift in how we understand parents’ involvement in their children’s education—a shift from focusing primarily on what parents do to engage with their children’s schools and with other actors within those schools, to also considering how parents understand the hows and whys of their engagement, and how this engagement relates more broadly to parents’ experiences and actions both inside and out of the school community. In explaining this framework, we situate parental engagement as a relational phenomenon that relies on activity networks. In doing so, we highlight the crucial importance that both space and capital play in the relative success parents (and teachers) have in engaging parents in the academic venue of urban schooling. Drawing from our understanding of the intersections between space and capital in the worlds of parents and school, we make the argument that parental engagement ought to be thought of as the mediation between space and capital.

Curriculum strategy framework: investigating patterns in teachers' use of a reform-based elementary mathematics curriculum

The goal of this paper is to introduce the curriculum strategy framework as a way to characterize teachers’ interactions with curriculum materials. The framework focuses on three key interpretive activities: reading, evaluating, and adapting curriculum materials. Describing an individual teacher’s curriculum strategy involves identifying the manner in which a teacher engages with each of these activities before, during, and after instruction. This paper presents the results of a study in which the framework was used to identify patterns in the curriculum strategies of 10 elementary‐school teachers who were using a reform‐based mathematics curriculum for the first time. It concludes with directions for further research using the curriculum strategy framework, and implications of this work for curriculum designers.

Using Educative Curriculum Materials to Support the Development of Prospective Teachers’ Knowledge:

Building on the work of Ball and Cohen and that of Davis and Krajcik, as well as more recent research related to teacher learning from and about curriculum materials, we seek to answer the question, How can prospective teachers (PTs) learn to read and use educative curriculum materials in ways that support them in acquiring the knowledge needed for teaching? We present two extended conceptual examples of ways in which educative curriculum materials might be used to support PTs in developing the knowledge needed for teaching. We follow these examples with a set of empirically based design principles and conclude with a brief consideration of unanswered questions related to the use of educative curriculum materials in teacher education.

Experience Counts: Career Stage and Teachers’ Responses to Mathematics Education Reform

This article explores the relationships between elementary teachers’ career stages and their interpretation and implementation of mathematics education reform. This is done using (a) secondary analysis of data from a survey of several hundred teachers in California after the passage of statewide mathematics education reforms and (b) in-depth case studies of sixteachers implementing a reform-oriented mathematics curriculum. The author finds that teachers at different career stages differ significantly in their approaches to mathematics education reform. In particular, they differ in their willingness and ability to teach in reform-oriented ways, in their understandings of reform, and in how they integrate reform ideas into their current practices. This study has implications not only for the design of future education reform policies but also for the analysis and understanding of educators’responses to these policies.

Making Connections in Practice: How Prospective Elementary Teachers Connect to Children’s Mathematical Thinking and Community Funds of Knowledge in Mathematics Instruction

This study examines the ways prospective elementary teachers (PSTs) made connections to children’s mathematical thinking and children’s community funds of knowledge in mathematics lesson plans. We analyzed the work of 70 PSTs from across three university sites associated with an instructional module for elementary mathematics methods courses that asks PSTs to visit community settings and develop problem solving mathematics lessons that connect to mathematical practices in these settings (Community Mathematics Exploration Module). Using analytic induction, we identified three distinct levels of connections to children’s mathematical thinking and their community funds of knowledge evidenced in PSTs’ work (emergent, transitional, and meaningful). Findings describe how these connections reflected different points on a learning trajectory. This study has implications for understanding how PSTs begin to connect to children’s mathematical funds of knowledge in their teaching, a practice shown to be effective for teaching diverse groups of children.

A Review of Research on Prospective Teachers’ Learning About Children’s Mathematical Thinking and Cultural Funds of Knowledge

Researchers have studied the preparation of elementary teachers to teach mathematics to students from diverse racial, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds by focusing either on teachers’ learning about children’s mathematical thinking (CMT) or, less frequently, about children’s cultural funds of knowledge (CFoK) related to mathematics. Despite this important work, elementary teachers continue to be underprepared to teach mathematics effectively in diverse communities. We suggest that one way to address this persistent challenge is to integrate these two lines of work. This review focuses on research related to how prospective teachers (PSTs) learn to connect to CMT and CFoK in mathematics instruction. We use the review to describe elements of a robust theoretical framework of PST learning about CMT and CFoK, and synthesize how the studies reviewed contribute to these different elements.

Preservice Elementary Mathematics Teachers’ Emerging Ability to Write Problems to Build on Children’s Mathematics

It has become increasingly important for mathematics teacher educators to assist elementary preservice teachers (PSTs) in leveraging the knowledge of children’s learning of mathematics during instruction. Professional noticing (Jacobs et al. J Res Math Educ 41(2):169–202, 2010) involves the interrelated skills of attending, interpreting, and responding to children’s mathematics. Responding with problems that build on children’s mathematical thinking is a skill that is both difficult to learn and a critical practice in teaching elementary mathematics. We present our analyses of PSTs’ responses to a sequence of three increasingly complex methods course activities designed to scaffold PSTs’ engagement in professional noticing, and to develop their abilities to write problems that build on children’s mathematics. Supported by our series of activities, PSTs demonstrated a strong foundation in attending to and interpreting children’s mathematics. In comparison, however, these experiences did not result in comparable gains in responding to the children’s mathematical thinking, a result with implications for mathematics education.

Middle School Mathematics Teachers’ Perceptions of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and Related Assessment and Teacher Evaluation Systems

In this study, U.S. middle school teachers’ perceptions of Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM), CCSSM-related assessments, teacher evaluation processes, and resources for implementing CCSSM were investigated. Using a mixed methods design, a national sample of 366 teachers was surveyed, and 24 teachers were interviewed. Findings indicated that teachers viewed CCSSM as including new content for their grade level. Teachers also reported using multiple curriculum resources to align with CCSSM and indicated that new assessments would serve as a proxy for CCSSM. Implications for rapidly changing policy, curriculum, assessment, instruction, and professional development related to CCSSM are discussed.

Enhancing and Enacting Curricular Progressions in Elementary Mathematics.

In this study, we examined how curricular resources supported three expert teachers in their enactment of progressions. Using a video-stimulated interview process, we documented the multiple types of progressions identified, described, and enacted by the teachers. Results indicate that the teachers used four different types of progressions—mathematical concepts, instructional activities, number choices, and student solutions—and that the progressions were embedded within each other. This study contributes to the field’s understanding of the ways in which expert teachers make use of curriculum- and research-based progressions in their teaching practices.