Cases For Mathematics Teacher Educators

The Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE) in its 2015 position paper on Equity in Mathematics Teacher Education provides a list of actions for mathematics teacher educators (MTE’s) to help them develop and implement equitable practices. The position paper states it is critical that mathematics teacher educators: “Model equity?based pedagogy that emphasizes rich and rigorous mathematics; elicit and build on children’s and young adults’ mathematical thinking; connect to P?12 students’ cultural/linguistic knowledge and backgrounds as well as individual interests; facilitate mathematical discourse; minimize status issues by expanding broader participation and engagement where varied mathematical strengths are valued; and promote positive mathematical identity and agency (p. 2)”. Cases for Mathematics Teacher Educators: Facilitating Conversations about Inequities in Mathematics Classrooms provides an excellent resource to start conversations describing the enactment of these actions. The book is organized into three main sections: (1) Conversations About Inequities in Mathematics Methods Courses, (2) Conversations About Inequities in Mathematics Content Courses, and (3) Conversations about Inequities in Graduate and Professional Development Contexts. Across these sections there are 19 cases and 57 corresponding commentaries focused on dilemmas that arise when mathematics teacher educators foreground equity in their work. This book of cases provides a needed resource for MTEs to engage prospective teachers, practicing teachers, and future teacher educators in discussions about inequities, privilege, and oppression in society, in schools, and in the mathematics classroom. It is the product of the thinking and experiences of 87 authors who are committed to the improvement of mathematics teacher education.

(Orginally published in 2008) The goal of AMTE Monograph 4, "Cases in Mathematics Teacher Education: Tools for Developing Knowledge Needed for Teaching", is to provide detailed accounts of case use that will inform the mathematics teacher education community on the range of ways in which cases can be used to foster teacher learning and the capacity to reflect on and learn from teaching. The chapters in this monograph describe the use of cases with preservice and practicing teachers at all levels K - 12, in content and methods courses as well as professional development settings, and focus on developing various aspects of teachers' knowledge base (i.e., content, pedagogy, and students as learners). Hence, Monograph 4 should prove to be a superb resource for mathematics teacher educators.

The Handbook of Mathematics Teacher Education, the first of its kind, addresses the learning of mathematics teachers at all levels of schooling to teach mathematics, and the provision of activity and programmes in which this learning can take place. It consists of four volumes. Volume 2, Tools and Processes in Mathematics Teacher Education, focuses on the “how” of mathematics teacher education.

Helping students develop an understanding of important mathematical ideas is a persistent challenge for teachers. In this book, one of a three-volume set, well-known mathematics educators Margaret Smith, Edward A. Silver, and Mary Kay Stein provide teachers of mathematics the support they need to improve their instruction. They focus on ways to engage upper elementary, middle school, and high school students in thinking, reasoning, and problem solving to build their mathematics understanding and proficiency. The content focus of Volume One is rational numbers and proportionality. Using materials that were developed under the NSF-funded COMET (Cases of Mathematics to Enhance Teaching) program, each volume in the set features cases from urban, middle school classrooms with ethnically, racially, and linguistically diverse student populations. Each case illustrates an instructional episode in the classroom of a teacher who is implementing standards-based instruction, the teachers' perspective, including their thoughts and actions as they interact with students and with key aspects of mathematical content, cognitively challenging mathematics activities that are built around samples of authentic classroom practice., and facilitation chapters to help professional developers "teach" the cases, including specific guidelines for facilitating discussions and suggestions for connecting the ideas presented in the cases to a teacher's own practice. As a complete set, this resource provides a basis on which to build a comprehensive professional development program to improve mathematics instruction and student learning.

Building Support for Scholarly Practices in Mathematics Methods is the product of collaborations among over 40 mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) who teach mathematics methods courses for prospective PreK?12 teachers in many different institutional contexts and structures. Each chapter unpacks ways in which MTEs use theoretical perspectives to inform their construction of goals, activities designed to address those goals, facilitation of activities, and ways in which MTEs make sense of experiences prospective teachers have as a result. The book is organized in seven sections that highlight how the theoretical perspective of the instructor impacts scholarly inquiry and practice. The final section provides insight as we look backward to reflect, and forward with excitement, moving with the strength of the variation we found in our stories and the feeling of solidarity that results in our understandings of purposes for and insight into teaching mathematics methods. This book can serve as a resource for MTEs as they discuss and construct scholarly practices and as they undertake scholarly inquiry as a means to systematically examine their practice.

Research in mathematics teacher education as a distinctive field of inquiry has grown substantially over the past 10-15 years. Within this field there is emerging interest in how mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) themselves learn and develop. Until recently there were few published studies on this topic, and the processes by which mathematics teacher educators learn, and the forms of knowledge they require for effective practice, had not been systematically investigated. However, researchers in mathematics education are now beginning to investigate the development of MTE expertise and associated issues. This volume draws on the latest research and thinking in this area is therefore timely to stimulate future development and directions. It will survey the emerging field of inquiry in mathematics education, combining the work of established scholars with perspectives of newcomers to the field, with the aim of influencing development of the field, invite cross-cultural comparisons in becoming a mathematics teacher educator by highlighting issues in the development of MTEs in different countries, and examine the roles of both mathematics educators and mathematicians in preparing future teachers of mathematics. The primary audience will be university-based mathematics teacher educators and MTE researchers, and postgraduate research students who are seeking academic careers as MTEs. Additional interest may come from teacher educators in disciplines other than mathematics, and education policy makers responsible for accreditation and quality control of initial teacher education programs.

This book provides an overview of a body of work conducted over the past seven years related to the preparation of secondary mathematics teachers by the Mathematics Teacher Education Partnership (MTE-Partnership), a national consortium of more than 90 universities and 100 school systems. The MTE-Partnership is organized as a Networked Improvement Community (NIC), which combines the disciplined inquiry of improvement science with the power of networking to accelerate improvement by engaging a broad set of participants. The MTE-Partnership is addressing key challenges in secondary mathematics teacher preparation, including: - Supporting the development of content knowledge relevant to teaching secondary mathematics; - Providing effective clinical experiences to teacher candidates; - Recruiting secondary mathematics teacher candidates, ensuring program completion and their subsequent retention in the field as early career teachers; - Supporting overall transformation of secondary mathematics teacher preparation in alignment with these challenges; - Ensuring a focus on equity and social justice in secondary mathematics teacher recruitment, preparation, and induction. This book outlines existing knowledge related to each of these key challenges, as well as the work of Research Action Clusters (RACs) formed to address the challenges. Each RAC includes participants from multiple institutions who work collaboratively to iteratively develop, test, and refine processes and products that can help programs more effectively prepare secondary mathematics teacher candidates. The book describes promising approaches to improving aspects of secondary mathematics teacher preparation developed by the RACs, including specific products that have been developed, which will inform the work of others involved in secondary mathematics teacher preparation. In addition, reflections on the use of the NIC model provides insights for others considering this research design. Particular references to the Standards for Preparing Teachers of Mathematics (Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators, 2017) are included throughout the book.

This casebook is intended to support professionals who are working in a variety of contexts to use classroom-based assessment more effectively to support teacher learning and teaching change, and to enhance the opportunities for all students to develop mathematical power. It grows out of a collaboration of mathematics teachers and teacher educators, and mathematicians, to better understand the role of assessment as an ongoing activity to help teachers reshape their own teaching practices. At the heart of each case is using assessment to make sense of what students understand and what they are confused about, deciding what counts as evidence of that understanding, and using the analysis to consider what the teacher's next instructional moves might be. All of the cases in this volume are built around actual episodes from mathematics classrooms. Intended as decision-making exercises, they present the raw data of classroom events in a straightforward way and are designed to stimulate analysis and reflection; provoke various and sometimes conflicting interpretations of an event; bring to the fore deeply held beliefs of beginning and experienced teachers so they can be reconsidered; and engage professionals in pedagogical problem solving in the context of complex classroom settings. This volume reflects the growing interest in cases as a pedagogical tool in teacher professional development. The cases are organized to take up key themes of the NCTM Professional Teaching Standards in ways that will assist and support teachers, teacher educators, and curriculum and staff development specialists in learning to assess and in linking assessment with curriculum, teaching, and learning. Although each case contains many ideas for linking assessment with curriculum and instruction, the most powerful use of these materials resides in their design intended to foster conversations among groups of professional colleagues. The editors' field-testing of the cases--in initial teacher certification courses and in in-service workshops--has shown that they prompt engaging and demanding analysis through a variety of analytic lenses. A videotape containing vignettes for four of the cases in the Casebook is available with this book. Transcriptions of the video vignettes are printed in the case materials in the book. Course instructors and professional development facilitators will need both the Casebook and the videotape and should order the Casebook/Video set. The video can also be ordered separately.