A teacher's orchestration of mathematics in a 'typical' classroom

This paper explores the complexity of interpreting teachers' practice in relation to mathematical meaning making in 'typical' classrooms in England. An observation framework has been developed to interpret classroom activities that draws on a range of theoretical perspectives, including variation theory (Marton & Pang, 2006) and notions of classroom norms (Cobb, Gresalfi, & Hodge, 2009). This paper focusses on the analysis of two lessons in order to discuss the potential of this framework to foreground the mathematics made available to students and the pedagogical moves made by the teacher to bring this about. In England, class composition for secondary mathematics is usually decided by measures of prior attainment, with students of similar 'ability' grouped together. A wider study is exploring shifts in teachers' pedagogical approaches when they teach classes with different attainment profiles. Consideration here is given to whether observation of a few lessons using this framework can identify stable mathematical characteristics, so that in future the framework would allow comparisons between classes to be made.