{"id":66372,"date":"2022-05-06T16:42:00","date_gmt":"2022-05-06T20:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/?post_type=bu-article&#038;p=66372"},"modified":"2023-09-13T13:57:04","modified_gmt":"2023-09-13T17:57:04","slug":"faculty-research-spotlight-dr-meghan-shaughnessy","status":"publish","type":"bu-article","link":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/news\/articles\/2022\/faculty-research-spotlight-dr-meghan-shaughnessy\/","title":{"rendered":"Faculty Research Spotlight: Dr. Meghan Shaughnessy"},"content":{"rendered":"\t<div class=\"wp-block-editorial-leadin news-block-editorial-leadin is-style-side-by-side has-media has-box has-media-focus-center-middle has-quaternary-theme\">\n\t\t<div class=\"container-lockup\">\n\n\t\t\t<div class=\"wp-block-leadin-media\">\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t<img width=\"2041\" height=\"2542\" src=\"\/wheelock\/files\/2022\/05\/Meghan_Shaughnessy_head-shot-crop.jpg\" class=\"\" alt=\"Meghan Shaughnessy of BU Wheelock\" loading=\"lazy\" srcset=\"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/files\/2022\/05\/Meghan_Shaughnessy_head-shot-crop.jpg 2041w, https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/files\/2022\/05\/Meghan_Shaughnessy_head-shot-crop-482x600.jpg 482w, https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/files\/2022\/05\/Meghan_Shaughnessy_head-shot-crop-1204x1500.jpg 1204w, https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/files\/2022\/05\/Meghan_Shaughnessy_head-shot-crop-768x957.jpg 768w, https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/files\/2022\/05\/Meghan_Shaughnessy_head-shot-crop-1233x1536.jpg 1233w, https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/files\/2022\/05\/Meghan_Shaughnessy_head-shot-crop-1644x2048.jpg 1644w, https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/files\/2022\/05\/Meghan_Shaughnessy_head-shot-crop-663x826.jpg 663w, https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/files\/2022\/05\/Meghan_Shaughnessy_head-shot-crop-276x344.jpg 276w, https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/files\/2022\/05\/Meghan_Shaughnessy_head-shot-crop-425x529.jpg 425w, https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/files\/2022\/05\/Meghan_Shaughnessy_head-shot-crop-548x682.jpg 548w, https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/files\/2022\/05\/Meghan_Shaughnessy_head-shot-crop-829x1032.jpg 829w, https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/files\/2022\/05\/Meghan_Shaughnessy_head-shot-crop-1061x1321.jpg 1061w, https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/files\/2022\/05\/Meghan_Shaughnessy_head-shot-crop-552x688.jpg 552w, https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/files\/2022\/05\/Meghan_Shaughnessy_head-shot-crop-849x1058.jpg 849w, https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/files\/2022\/05\/Meghan_Shaughnessy_head-shot-crop-1095x1364.jpg 1095w, https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/files\/2022\/05\/Meghan_Shaughnessy_head-shot-crop-1326x1652.jpg 1326w, https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/files\/2022\/05\/Meghan_Shaughnessy_head-shot-crop-1657x2064.jpg 1657w, https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/files\/2022\/05\/Meghan_Shaughnessy_head-shot-crop-803x1000.jpg 803w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2041px) 100vw, 2041px\" \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"container-words-outer\">\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"container-words-inner\">\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"wp-prepress-tag\">Mathematics<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<h1 class=\"head\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tFaculty Research Spotlight: Dr. Meghan Shaughnessy\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/h1>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t\n<div class=\"wp-prepress-component-metabar js-block-editorial-metabar news-prepress-layout-metabar\">\n\t<div class=\"wp-prepress-component-metabar-wrapper\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"wp-prepress-component-metabar-date\">May 6, 2022<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"wp-prepress-component-metabar-credits\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<ul data-credit-type=\"By\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<li><a href=\"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/news\/authors\/ashley-morrow\/\">Ashley Morrow<\/a><\/li>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/ul>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"wp-prepress-component-metabar-share js-bu-prepress-share-tools\">\n\t\t\t<span class=\"icon-twitter\"><span>Twitter<\/span><\/span>\n\t\t\t<span class=\"icon-facebook\"><span>Facebook<\/span><\/span>\n\t\t\t<span class=\"icon-action\"><\/span>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\t\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/profile\/meghan-shaughnessy\/\">Meghan Shaughnessy<\/a> is an assistant professor of mathematics education at BU Wheelock. She designs and studies practice-intensive approaches to teachers\u2019 professional preparation and ongoing learning. In this work, she focuses on teaching practices that are critical for fostering students\u2019 positive mathematical identities and agency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Shaughnessy and her colleagues have received multiple grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support the design, use, and study of teaching simulations. They focus on assessing teacher candidates\u2019 skills with eliciting and interpreting a student\u2019s mathematical thinking. She is currently studying the use of these teaching simulations for formative assessment in teacher preparation with specific attention to the ways in which feedback impacts teacher candidates\u2019 subsequent teaching practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In other work, Shaughnessy and her colleagues have received additional funding from NSF to pursue the design and study of professional development for elementary mathematics teachers. They seek to improve elementary teachers\u2019 skills with leading mathematics discussions in ways that attend to and disrupt patterns of inequity that are often amplified during classrooms discussions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<section class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a news-block-editorial-q-and-a has-quaternary-theme\"><div class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-title\"><h2 class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-title-heading\">Q<span>&amp;<\/span>A<\/h2><h4 class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-title-subheading\"><\/h4><\/div>\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-question\"><span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-name\">Question:<\/span> <span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-content\"><strong>What is your research focus?<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-answer\"><span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-name\">Shaughnessy:<\/span> <span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-content\">My research focuses on teacher education and supporting teacher candidates in getting better at teaching\u2014I 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 \u201cWhat did you do?\u201d and support learning about children\u2019s reasoning.<br><br>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\u2019 developing skills with teaching practice. We had them go out to field placement classrooms and engage in what we refer to as \u201cstudent thinking interviews.\u201d Candidates worked one on one with students\u2014providing 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.<br><br>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&#8217;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.<br>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.<br><br>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 \u201cstudent\u201d 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.<br><br>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.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-question\"><span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-name\">Question:<\/span> <span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-content\"><strong>What drives you to conduct your specific research?<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-answer\"><span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-name\">Shaughnessy:<\/span> <span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-content\">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.<br><br>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 \u201cstandard\u201d in other parts of the world, but not in the U.S. &nbsp;This created space to discuss how students may solve problems differently in the classroom than at home.<br><br>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.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-question\"><span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-name\">Question:<\/span> <span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-content\"><strong>What are some challenges that you have encountered in your research?<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-answer\"><span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-name\">Shaughnessy:<\/span> <span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-content\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-question\"><span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-name\">Question:<\/span> <span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-content\"><strong>What is a favorite finding or study that you produced\u2014and why is it your favorite?<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-answer\"><span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-name\">Shaughnessy:<\/span> <span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-content\">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&nbsp;<em>Journal of Teacher Education,<\/em>&nbsp;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.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-question\"><span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-name\">Question:<\/span> <span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-content\"><strong>What is an important implication of the work you do?<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-answer\"><span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-name\">Shaughnessy:<\/span> <span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-content\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-question\"><span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-name\">Question:<\/span> <span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-content\"><strong>Where is your research headed?<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-answer\"><span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-name\">Shaughnessy:<\/span> <span class=\"wp-block-editorial-q-and-a-content\">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&#8217; 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Meghan Shaughnessy is an assistant professor of mathematics education at BU Wheelock. She designs and studies practice-intensive approaches to teachers\u2019 professional preparation and ongoing learning. In this work, she focuses on teaching practices that are critical for fostering students\u2019 positive mathematical identities and agency. Shaughnessy and her colleagues have received multiple grants from the National [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9274,"featured_media":58188,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"bu_prepress_billboard":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term":"Mathematics","_bu_prepress_primary_term_manual":""},"tags":[6410],"bu-publication":[6614],"magazine-article-category":[],"magazine-topic":[],"news-article-category":[6754,6645,6778,6646,6776],"news-topic":[6789],"bu_edition":[],"media_type":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/66372"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/bu-article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9274"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66372"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/66372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72611,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/66372\/revisions\/72611"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66372"},{"taxonomy":"bu-publication","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-publication?post=66372"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-article-category?post=66372"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-topic?post=66372"},{"taxonomy":"news-article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-article-category?post=66372"},{"taxonomy":"news-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-topic?post=66372"},{"taxonomy":"bu_edition","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu_edition?post=66372"},{"taxonomy":"media_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media_type?post=66372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}