Proceedings of the 7th World Conference on Education and Teaching
Year: 2025
DOI:
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Introducing Time-Limited Cognitively Demanding Tasks into Teaching Practice: Expansive Learning Perspective
Ana Linta, Reinert Andre Rinvold
ABSTRACT:
The preparation of teaching and teaching itself are two routine activities in teacher practice. When introducing educational change into existing practice that is expected to lead to the establishment of a new form of practice, the existing practice go through a process of expansive learning. The aim of this paper is to present the expansive learning cycles that appeared in a study on preparing and applying time-limited cognitively demanding tasks (CDT) in the classroom. Expansive learning theory, which is grounded in cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), is used as an analytical framework for the identification of expansive learning actions and the analysis of their cyclicity. The study was conducted in two schools and three teachers participated in the project. Data were collected through interviews and video recordings of preparation meetings and observations of task implementation. The teachers were also interviewed in the beginning of the project to obtain data on their previous practice. In this intervention study, the task implementation model was suggested by the researcher, although it is not common in the studies on expansive learning. The results show that all seven learning actions occurred during the study and formed smaller potentially expansive learning cycles which, although deviating from the ideal learning cycle, open the possibility for transformation of the existing teaching practices.
keywords: activity, educational change, learning actions, learning cycles, mathematics