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By John Bragelman

John Bragelman is an Associate Professor of Mathematics and a 2025 recipient of the LEAP into Action grant.

In 2025, I applied for and received one of Â鶹ÊÓƵ’s LEAP into Action grants. For those unfamiliar, LEAP into Action grants offer faculty the opportunity to make impactful changes to one of their courses by supporting implementation of High-Impact Practices. In this blog post, I share my experience with the process.

To provide some context, I train future teachers. Here at Â鶹ÊÓƵ, I primarily teach mathematics content courses for our elementary, middle, and high school teacher preparation programs. My research falls in this space. In particular, I explore ways to develop preservice teachers’ expertise in attending to, interpreting, and shaping children’s mathematical thinking. Because of this, children’s thinking is the lens through which I teach mathematics in my content courses. However, the students who take my courses typically enroll in them before they begin their field experiences through the College of Education, and so most have yet to interact professionally with children. As such, I leverage representations of children’s thinking in my courses. These representations of children’s thinking include (1) work samples of children’s solutions to math tasks, (2) videos of children solving math tasks, typically in authentic classrooms (such as the IMAP videos), and, more recently, (3) teaching simulations.

Simulations are a common tool in professional development, such as flight simulations for pilot training, surgical simulations with cadavers for future doctors, and legal simulations of court cases for future lawyers. In teaching simulations, preservice teachers interact with a hypothetical student, traditionally roleplayed by a researcher or paid actor. In my past research with teaching simulations, the simulations occurred outside of class, over Zoom, where a preservice teacher interacted with either myself or one of my research team roleplaying as the hypothetical student. Results proved fruitful, as we learned much about how preservice teachers attend to and interpret the hypothetical student’s thinking, which informed how the preservice teacher developed a model of the student’s mathematical thinking. However, this method of exploring teaching simulations had limitations. The simulations were time-intensive for my research team, as each Zoom session required two researchers, one to interview and one to play the role of the hypothetical student. This meant students only experienced teaching simulations during data collection, and even when the simulations were occurring, only a limited number of students could participate. In other words, the teaching simulations were not practical or scalable. Aware of these limitations, I applied for a 2025 LEAP into Action grant to transfer several teaching simulation protocols into classroom activities.

Within the context of classroom activities, preservice teachers share opportunities to roleplay as teachers and as hypothetical students. When we debrief after the simulation, it is done as a whole-class discussion, so preservice teachers can share their perspectives about the simulation while listening to others’ perspectives. Finally, employing teaching simulations as a classroom activity helps normalize that children’s thinking is the central lens through which mathematics content should be viewed.

Now midway through Spring semester of 2026, I have piloted two of the four teaching simulation activities in my mathematics content course. My students are providing invaluable feedback, which is helping to refine the activities. And more importantly, every student is experiencing multiple teaching simulations a semester, both in the teacher role and the student role. In their words, they describe the simulations as a way to “practice teaching.”

Because of the support of the LEAP into Action grant, I have been able to transition research-oriented practices into classroom practices. Now my work reaches more of Â鶹ÊÓƵ’s students. After this pilot, I will have laid the groundwork to continue conducting research on teaching simulations, which will in turn support my future success at Â鶹ÊÓƵ.