Exploring Mathematics Teacher Educator Questioning as a Relational Practice: Acknowledging Imbalances

The desire to understand our questioning practices as relational led us to use collaborative self-study to construct images of our questioning practice within our mathematics teacher education practices. In a prior exploration of written feedback we had begun to consider how our practices supported relationships with preservice teachers. As a result, we began to consider ways we engaged preservice teachers during instruction and wondered how our questions supported or constrained growth of relationships. In this article we share ways our expectations for what we call balance in our questioning practices were disrupted. We describe three waves of inquiry that gave form to our exploration and resulted in awareness of the role and anticipation of imbalance in our questioning practice. Each new wave resulted from findings of the previous waves and pushed us back to the research literature and forward to new images of our questioning. We tell our story using one episode from our practice, images of that practice shared at the 2018 Castle Conference, and lenses that help us anticipate imbalance in our practice.