Using scripting tasks to reveal mathematics teacher candidates' resources for responding to student errors

Practice-based pedagogies, such as representations of practice and approximations of practice, are increasingly common in mathematics teacher education. More needs to be known about how teacher candidates' (TCs') productions through such activities make visible the resources they bring to the work of teaching. In this paper, we highlight our use of “scripting tasks,” through which secondary mathematics TCs produced dialogues of classroom interactions and rationales for those scripts in response to a provided classroom scenario. We share how analyses of TCs' scripts and rationales can make visible a range of resources that TCs bring to the work of teaching—tools and practices, vision and dispositions of teaching, and understandings of students and content (Hammerness et al., 2005)—that inform how they respond to student contributions in whole-class discussions as a focal teaching practice. We illustrate a rich example and framework for analyzing TCs' responses to scripting tasks and offer implications for how such analyses can support teacher educators and researchers to make claims about TCs' learning and inform decisions about supports for TCs' development.