Adaptive instruction that supports collective argumentation

When a classroom environment is designed to foster student sense-making and reasoning, resulting in collective argumentation, the teacher’s support for collective argumentation requires adaptive teaching. This paper examines the teacher’s adaptive support for argumentation during the teaching of mathematics in a digital environment that simulated a laboratory experiment. The teacher and twenty 15-year-old students engaged in multiple episodes of argumentation during the class. Adaptiveness of instruction is evidenced by the teacher’s actions in support of collective argumentation both within and across episodes of argumentation. Within episodes, the kinds of questions and other supportive actions reveal the teacher’s focus on adapting instruction with respect to the utterances, gestures, and observations of the students. Across episodes, the teacher’s support for collective argumentation differed from the beginning of class to the end as evidenced by the number of questions asked in early episodes of argumentation and the preponderance of repeating actions later in the class session.