What does it mean to be a teacher?

Professor of Mathematics Education Ilana Seidel Horn offers a compelling insight into how teachers individually navigate their field through pedagogical reasoning and responsibility.

In my research, I listen to teachers’ everyday workplace talk as a way of understanding how they think about their jobs. With records and transcripts of this talk, alongside rich supporting interview and observational data, I hone in on teachers’ pedagogical reasoning – how they identify problems of teaching practice and elaborate their thinking on them through reasons, explanations or justifications. As teachers diagnose the troubles they encounter and imagine potential responses, I learn a lot about how they think about key facets of instruction: students, their content, their school and colleagues, and their personal understanding of what it means to do their jobs well.