Learning to Enact Number Talks using Mixed-Reality Simulations: How Conversations Surrounding Simulations Provide Opportunities for Inservice Teacher Learning

Teachers are being asked to enact whole-class discussions in their mathematics classrooms to support student sensemaking. A number talk is a short instructional routine that emphasizes whole-class discussion. This study sought to understand how mixed-reality simulations, when coupled with well-established professional learning design features, provide teachers with opportunities to learn to enact number talks. We examined conversations surrounding number talks using mixed-reality simulations and found that the conversations were rich with talk questioning or suggesting pedagogical actions, providing pedagogical reasoning for those actions, and implicating related pedagogical responsibilities, revealing “pedagogical judgment” (Horn, 2019). Further, within these conversations, teachers often connected their experiences in the simulation to experiences in their own classrooms. When embedded in a larger professional learning design, conversations surrounding mixed-reality simulations provide opportunities for teachers to collaboratively develop their teaching practice.