A sketch of analysis of the teacher’s moves towards the implementation of “scientific debates” in the mathematics classroom

Abstract

As part of an ongoing research on the practice of “scientific debate” in French-speaking Belgium, we observed some teachers practicing scientific debates in their mathematics courses. We notice they intervene more in the discussion than what we would naively expect. In this preliminary study, we analyse the teacher’s discourse during one short discussion episode and try to classify his interventions to understand how he supports his pupils to voice their opinion about the discussed problem and how he pushes them to question their own opinions.