Sociocultural perspectives on curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment support teachers in developing and implementing inclusive pedagogies. Sociocultural assessment approaches disregard impairment as an identity in itself, privileging the strengths and knowledge evident in observed interactions. A sociocultural approach to assessment recognizes the dynamic interaction between teaching, learning, and assessment, spread across people, places, and time. Where traditional forms of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment focus on a decontextualized individual, a sociocultural perspective pays close attention to contexts. Teachers’ practices, expectations, and understandings of learning and diversity form a key part of the contexts. In culturally responsive paradigms, learning is recognized as sociocultural—being informed through interactions with others. All students are recognized and valued as people who gain experiences and knowledge across many contexts. Multiple perspectives are valued as shared understandings and constructions of learning are developed in response to observations and interactions in a community of learners—where students and teachers learn with and from each other. Teachers who recognize themselves as capable of teaching everyone in the class are more likely to recognize everyone as a learner, to think critically about their positioning and understanding of disability, and to plan teaching, learning, and assessment in inclusive ways of working.

No abstract

The study that we report in this chapter contributes to our broader research agenda for evaluating the impact of a national professional development programme that upskills out-of-field post-primary mathematics teachers in Ireland. The aim of the study was to compare the self-efficacy beliefs, perceived and observed classroom practices of six post-primary mathematics teachers (three groups of 2) who were either out-of-field, upskilled via the professional development programme, or in-field. The teachers completed surveys of their self-efficacy beliefs and approaches to teaching mathematics. Video recordings of three mathematics lessons taught by each teacher were analysed using the Productive Pedagogies classroom observation framework. The findings showed that there were similarities and differences between the three groups of teachers; however, the upskilled teachers were developing self-efficacy beliefs and pedagogical practices that are similar to those of in-field teachers of mathematics.

No abstract

In this paper we report on the effects of a different marketing strategy on promoting engagement with the online Mathematics Learning Support (MLS) service (mostly screencasts) compared to our traditional advertising approach which was solely to send generic emails to students advertising the online services. The findings show that this new marketing strategy was far more effective than traditional methods of advertising in getting students to engage with the online service. This paper describes the approach taken and compares the engagement with the online services offered by the Mathematics Learning Centre (MLC) before and after utilising the new marketing strategy, the increased engagement from the trial group with the online services compared to the other groups, and the knock-on effects.