Question: What is your research focus?

Shaughnessy: My research focuses on teacher education and supporting teacher candidates in getting better at teaching—I focus on elementary mathematics instruction. I am interested in interactive teaching practice, such as when teachers ask students questions to learn how they are thinking about content. Novice teachers often find it challenging to learn how to ask children questions that go beyond “What did you do?” and support learning about children’s reasoning.

My work in this began about twelve years ago, when I was teaching in the teacher education program at the University of Michigan. My colleagues and I explored different ways we could better learn about our candidates’ developing skills with teaching practice. We had them go out to field placement classrooms and engage in what we refer to as “student thinking interviews.” Candidates worked one on one with students—providing them with problems to work on, asking them questions, video recording, and analyzing the session. As a teacher educator, I watched the video recording and gave feedback.

However, one challenging aspect was that I had limited context for making inferences from the video. Further, there was a lack of predictability in the interactions. This meant that I couldn’t design an assignment where I wanted all of my candidates to experience eliciting the thinking of a student who approached problems in particular ways.
As a result, we began to learn more about preparation in other professional fields such as medicine and dentistry, where a substantial portion of work in preparation involves simulations. We wondered if we could do something similar in teacher preparation.

We designed a simulation where a teacher educator takes on the role of the elementary school student, and we have a teacher candidate interact with the “student” to learn more about that their thinking about mathematics. We began to use these simulations as a formative assessment at the University of Michigan teacher education program to complement their experiences working with actual children.

Building on this work, I have a new project funded by the NSF with the University of Michigan and Horizon Research, Inc., to develop a web-based application that allows teacher educators to provide real-time feedback to a candidate following participation in one of our teaching simulations. The application offers the teacher educator scaffolds for giving feedback to the candidate. In addition, we are studying how this feedback impacts subsequent teaching.

Question: What drives you to conduct your specific research?

Shaughnessy: As a teacher educator, I am constantly trying to refine my practice and find better ways to support elementary teachers. This past fall, I did a cycle of teaching simulations with my BU students, and they resulted in amazing conversations about teaching and learning. My candidates were encountering real dilemmas in teaching, and we discussed why they chose to engage or not engage in particular moves and what the potential tradeoffs were. That was powerful.

Engagement in the teaching simulations was intertwined with our focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. I designed a simulation in which candidates encountered a student solving a problem with an algorithm that is “standard” in other parts of the world, but not in the U.S.  This created space to discuss how students may solve problems differently in the classroom than at home.

As a teacher, you need to be curious about and have a willingness to explore a different approach rather than discounting a method just because that is not your own approach. Conveying curiosity rather than judgment signals to students that we value their way of thinking and conveys respect for students and their mathematical thinking.

Question: What are some challenges that you have encountered in your research?

Shaughnessy: Managing the time and cost of doing this work is a challenge. However, as a teacher educator, I appreciate the opportunity to talk with candidates about their teaching. My current project explores ways to make these sorts of experiences possible in large teacher education programs.

Question: What is a favorite finding or study that you produced—and why is it your favorite?

Shaughnessy: One of my early studies looked at a group of 45 teacher candidates and sought to understand the skills that the candidates brought to teacher preparation with respect to eliciting student thinking. This study, published in the Journal of Teacher Education, showed that as teacher educators, we need to design ways to learn about what our candidates already know and do to better design learning experiences.

Question: What is an important implication of the work you do?

Shaughnessy: One implication is that teacher educators cannot count on experience in the field to be enough for candidates to become good at asking students questions about their thinking and interpreting student thinking in productive ways. Teaching simulations are a useful complement to these experiences. A second implication is related to the naming of particular sorts of teaching moves for the field. Teaching suffers a lack of common language to talk about teaching. A third implication is supporting teacher educators in supporting the work of teacher candidates.

Question: Where is your research headed?

Shaughnessy: I am interested in using teaching simulations in other ways. I have a proposal with colleagues to use teaching simulations to support mentor teachers to improve their own teaching practice and the feedback they give to teacher candidates. A lot of research has documented the importance of student teaching and how it can be transformative for teacher candidates’ development. We know that mentors often receive little training. As a result, it is exciting to be able to think about ways that simulations might be used in that way as well.