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College of Education

Samantha Marshall

SM

Assistant Professor

Teacher Education and Learning Sciences

621 Poe Hall

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Bio

Dr. Marshall is an assistant professor in the Department of Teacher Education and Learning Sciences (TELS) at North Carolina State University. A first-generation college graduate, she received her B.S.E. in mathematics from Oklahoma Christian University, her M.A. from Columbia University, and her Ph.D. in Learning, Teaching & Diversity from Vanderbilt University. Her program of research is composed of two interrelated strands: (1) exploring how STEM learning environments can be more just and (2) investigating STEM teachers’ learning, particularly of justice-oriented pedagogies. Broadly, Dr. Marshall’s work informs the fields of STEM education, teacher education, and learning sciences.

Dr. Marshall’s work seeks to design, investigate, and refine supports for teachers’ learning. Her research projects have spanned questions of teachers’ learning through professional development, how teachers’ learning is shaped by enactment in context, as well as how STEM teachers learn ambitious, asset-based, and culturally sustaining pedagogies. Theoretically, she takes a situative and sociopolitical view on teachers’ learning to understand learning in context. Methodologically, she draws on qualitative tools from design-based research and case study research along with micro-analytic traditions like discourse and interaction analysis to uncover both mechanisms of teachers’ learning and promising innovations for supporting teacher learning. She has two current NSF-funded projects: (1) Project AWISE, which examines math teachers’ learning to support multilingual learners through teacher coaching, and (2) CAREER: Supporting Teachers to Leverage Students’ Languages in Mathematics. She has published in Journal of the Learning Sciences, Journal of Teacher Education, Teaching & Teacher Education, Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, among others.

Programs

 

Education

Ph.D. Learning, Teaching and Diversity Vanderbilt University 2020

M.A. Secondary Education Columbia University 2014

B.S.E. Mathematics Oklahoma Christian University 2008

Area(s) of Expertise

teacher learning; professional development; mathematics education; culturally sustaining pedagogies; translanguaging pedagogies; qualitative methods

Grants

Date: 08/01/23 - 7/31/26
Amount: $459,848.00
Funding Agencies: National Science Foundation (NSF)

In this Level I early stage Design and Development study on Teaching, using design-based research, we aim to design, implement, investigate, and iteratively refine a video-based coaching model to develop mathematics teachers��� responsive pedagogies for linguistically marginalized students. Building from cutting edge research on linguistically responsive mathematics pedagogies (Adler, 2021; de Araujo & Smith, 2021; Marshall et al., in press; Song & Coppersmith, 2020), this project addresses the persistent need to foster mathematics teachers��� learning about supporting linguistically marginalized students (Lucas & Villegas, 2010; Prediger, 2019). Our novel model centers the experiences of students through video clips as rich tools for teacher learning. Our approach builds from key findings from our small prior study: that video-based coaching can support teachers in learning justice-oriented pedagogies such as social justice mathematics (Marshall, 2022) and learning to disrupt racialized patterns of exclusion in mathematics classrooms (Marshall, 2020) by supporting teachers��� sensemaking about their own students��� unique experiences in mathematics classrooms and giving timely, formative feedback as teachers encounter problems of practice (Horn et al., 2022). Central to our model is this core insight: that classroom video holds potential for supporting teacher learning of responsive pedagogies because of its opening of a window into students��� experiences, proximity to practice, context-embeddedness, and affordances for troubleshooting such pedagogies soon after teachers try them in their classrooms. The scholars collaborating to lead this project have strong histories of work designing and investigating professional development for educational equity, and complementary expertise to build a powerful and scalable model for mathematics teachers learning of responsive pedagogies. Our overarching research question is: How do secondary mathematics teachers learn about supporting linguistically marginalized students? The primary outcomes of this research include: a portrait of the challenges and opportunities that mathematics teachers face in supporting linguistically marginalized students, an iteratively refined model of professional development for teachers��� learning of responsive pedagogies, and an empirically-grounded theory of teachers��� learning to support linguistically marginalized students.


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Groups

  • National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program
  • National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP)
  • Distinguished Alumnus, Oklahoma Christian University College of Education
  • Goodnight Early Career Innovator