Thanks for watching our video. Your comments and suggestions are appreciated. 

Your approach to investigate mathematics instruction across teaching contexts is quite interesting. I am interested in learning more about some of the ideas that teachers are starting to integrate into their own instruction, based on what they are noticing when viewing these videos. To what extent do their observations translate into noticeable changes in teachers' instruction and in what ways?

Hi Jamie, That's a great question that we aim to address in the follow-up systematics video analysis.  Right now, we just finished data collection of the Y4 videos where teachers re-taught their lessons. Based on our ongoing video screening, transcription, and analysis, we noticed teachers' incorporation of the key ideas discussed in the summer workshops (e.g., situating the new lesson in a real-world context along with concreteness fading; asking deep, comparison questions). In fact, during our post-instructional interviews, many teachers explicitly reflected upon the strategies they tried to incorporate in the lessons. One teacher emailed me stating, "Our workshop in August truly lit a fire for me.  I am particularly inspired by the idea of concreteness fading.  I have endeavored to work this concept into every math lesson that I've taught this year.  Embarrassingly, it never occurred to me before August how highly conceptual a notion an equation actually is.  I am making sure to build with my students considerable real-world meaning about math concepts before I introduce how these math relationships can be communicated in equation form." However, we also noticed issues of implementation based on the video data. For instance, even though some teachers tried to ask comparison questions, they accepted students’ non-deep explanations without further prompts.  In brief, we noticed teachers’ intentional incorporation of the learned strategies; we also noticed possible challenges in transforming the learned strategies. Our next step - as your questions also suggested – is to systematically analyze the classroom videos to figure out: to what extent and in what ways teachers have actually incorporated their observations into classroom teaching. Thanks for your great question!

This is a very interesting project from several perspectives.  Not only is it providing a window into new ideas (in both countries) for teaching math, but it also has the potential to dispel some of the stereotypic ideas of teaching, classrooms, and culture in the other country.  I am wondering if you have any plans to measure the "other" potential benefits of the cross-cultural experience for teachers.

Hi Nadine, Thank you for your comments and questions. I don't have formal plans to measure the "other" potential benefits. By "others," what are the possible ones? And, do you have any suggestions about possible measures? I am eager to hear your advice!

A quick note: In this upcoming June, I will bring 9 US teachers of this project to China for a 1-week classroom visit. Teachers are quite excited for this opportunity! Teachers in both countries will have opportunities to communicate; there will also be teaching exchanges (e.g., US teachers teach lessons to Chinese students). I thought of collecting some data to further explore teacher learning from their international peers. Do you have any suggestions about this? Thank you again!

Hi Meixia.  By "other" I was thinking of such things a breaking down social and cultural barriers, creating better understanding of what it is to teach and learn in another country, and dispelling stereotypic ideas of what education looks like in another country.  What a great opportunity for those 9 teachers!

That is a thoughtful and interesting direction that I will think more and dig in depth... Thank you so much for the inspiring suggestion, Nadine! 

Meixia,

Your project to initiate international collaboration among teachers for math instruction is fabulous!  How did you decide upon the topic of early algebra for elementary aged students?

I agree with Nadine's comment about breaking down social and cultural barriers, and spelling stereotypic ideas of what education looks like in other countries.  I was curious about the Chinese teachers' interest in the array model.  Is that not a common model used in their curriculum?

This is very interesting to me!

Can you elaborate on how teachers in both countries changed their lessons after viewing their counterparts?  I would love to hear more about that.  

Hi Katie, Thank you for your interests!!! This is a similar question to that of Jamie Mikeska. Please see my response above. We made some observations but still need a systematics analysis of the videos collected this year.