Decentering to support responsive teaching for middle school students

Abstract

A classroom study was conducted to understand how to engage in responsive teaching with 18 seventh grade students at three stages of units coordination during a unit on proportional reasoning co-taught by the first author and classroom teacher. In the unit, students worked on making two cars travel the same speed. Students at all three stages of units coordination learned to do so, as reported elsewhere (Hackenberg et al., 2023). This paper focuses on the practice of inquiring responsively in small groups. We found that teacher-researcher decentering was a mechanism underlying this practice. Decentering involves adopting the perspective of another person by setting one’s own perspective to the side and using the other’s perspective as a basis for interaction. We found that two patterns of decentering actions and a type of question, leveraging questions, supported students across stages of units coordination to sustain challenges and learn.