Abstract:

A gallery walk (GW) is an instructional strategy that fosters students’ sharing of written productions, based upon challenging tasks, in a poster format, which is displayed in or outside the classroom. Students are called to “visit the gallery of posters”, moving around the space, and provide feedback to each one. The GW ends with a collective discussion, in which students reflect on the feedback received and discuss it with their classmatess. The GW favors several higher order and social skills such as communication and discussion, critical thinking, and collaborative learning.

In times of the COVID-19 pandemic, all universities in Portugal were closed by mid March, and classes suddenly resorted to digital mode. In this paper, I share the results of an exploratory qualitative research, in which I seek to understand how the change of a GW to digital mode can be made so that it still fulfills its main educational purposes. I describe how I used a digital GW, and I analyze how it contributed to foster productive discussions among preservice teachers (PSTs), whose reactions to the activity I also investigated.

In early March 2020, I engaged my students (who were PSTs of mathematics preparing to teach grades 7th through 12th - pupils aged 12 to 17 years-old) in a GW, which was a required assignment of the Didactics of Mathematics course I was teaching them. The nine PSTs, working in pairs or groups of three elements, solved a set of four problems, chosen due to their potential to elicit distinct approaches and strategies. The problems targeted grades 5 through 9. In a 2-hour session, I monitored the PSTs’ progress and looked for the emergence of different strategies to solve the same problems. In the next session, the PSTs started building their posters, using an A2 cardboard, markers, colored pencils, etc. They were to display the solution to all problems, making the reasoning processes understandable to others, thus striving for clarity, comprehensiveness, and valid argumentation. This process was abruptly interrupted due to the country’s emergency state, and several adaptations had to be quickly made, so I turned the GW digital. It lost its dynamic character, but it could still work as a springboard for engaging the PSTs in peer-assessment and productive discussions. The PSTs shared the posters and gave feedback to one another in the course moodle platform. Some comments focused on the aesthetics of the poster, but most offered ideas to improve the clarity of the reasoning followed to solve the problems, making specific suggestions and raising questions.

The PSTs participated in a 2,5 hour long collective discussion, via zoom, which was audio-recorded, and completed a small questionnaire, in moodle, asking for their perspectives about the digital GW, the discussion, the feedback received, the difficulties encountered, and the responses found to face them. All PSTs were very receptive to the change in mode of the GW, and recognized its potential to foster the development of pupils’ mathematics communication skills, as well as their ability to understand and constructively critique each others’ work. They found the collective discussion very useful to clarify the feedback received and better understand its contributions to the improvement of the (digital) poster. Their main difficulty was the ability to communicate the reasoning followed to solve each problem in a simple and clear manner, but collaborative work helped them in this regard.

Keywords:

Gallery walk, preservice teacher education, mathematics, distance learning.