Putting Formative Feedback into Practice

In this chapter, we give an overview of what Project SIGMa teachers encountered when they participated in video-formative feedback (VFF) cycles. It is one thing to design an intervention; it is another thing entirely to put it into practice. In particular, we describe the double edge of the rich representations of instruction that we created to ground our co-inquiry dialogue, with the increased visibility of the details of practice also bringing increased teacher vulnerability. We also articulate how we, as a research team, coordinated our facilitation of these encounters, drawing on both prior research on teachers' learning and pilot work on teachers' learning through conversations with colleagues. Next, we illustrate the dialogism of our VFF facilitation through a close look at one instance of a teacher revising her inquiry questions, which we see as a microgenetic conceptual change about her instruction. Finally, we summarize the problems of practice that the VFFs elicited, both from the participating teachers and members of the research team, with an eye on what this suggests about learning about ambitious and equitable mathematics instruction.