Constructing Knowledge For Teaching Secondary Mathematics

Teacher education seeks to transform prospective and/or practicing teachers from neophyte possibly uncritical perspectives on teaching and learning to more knowledgeable, adaptable, analytic, insightful, observant, resourceful, reflective and confident professionals ready to address whatever challenges teaching secondary mathematics presents. This transformation occurs optimally through constructive engagement in tasks that foster knowledge for teaching secondary mathematics. Ideally such tasks provide a bridge between theory and practice, and challenge, surprise, disturb, confront, extend, or provoke examination of alternatives, drawn from the context of teaching. We define tasks as the problems or activities that, having been developed, evaluated and refined over time, are posed to teacher education participants. Such participants are expected to engage in these tasks collaboratively, energetically, and intellectually with an open mind and an orientation to future practice. The tasks might be similar to those used by classroom teachers (e.g., the analysis of a graphing problem) or idiosyncratic to teacher education (e.g., critique of videotaped practice). This edited volume includes chapters based around unifying themes of tasks used in secondary mathematics teacher education. These themes reflect goals for mathematics teacher education, and are closely related to various aspects of knowledge required for teaching secondary mathematics. They are not based on the conventional content topics of teacher education (e.g., decimals, grouping practices), but on broad goals such as adaptability, identifying similarities, productive disposition, overcoming barriers, micro simulations, choosing tools, and study of practice. This approach is innovative and appeals both to prominent authors and to our target audiences.

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.

The quality of primary and secondary school mathematics teaching is generally agreed to depend crucially on the subject-related knowledge of the teacher. However, there is increasing recognition that effective teaching calls for distinctive forms of subject-related knowledge and thinking. Thus, established ways of conceptualizing, developing and assessing mathematical knowledge for teaching may be less than adequate. These are important issues for policy and practice because of longstanding difficulties in recruiting teachers who are confident and conventionally well-qualified in mathematics, and because of rising concern that teaching of the subject has not adapted sufficiently. The issues to be examined in Mathematical Knowledge in Teaching are of considerable significance in addressing global aspirations to raise standards of teaching and learning in mathematics by developing more effective approaches to characterizing, assessing and developing mathematical knowledge for teaching.

Sharpen concrete teaching strategies that empower students to reason-and-prove How do teachers and students benefit from engaging in reasoning-and-proving? What strategies can teachers use to support students’ capacity to reason-and-prove? What does reasoning-and-proving instruction look like? We Reason & We Prove for ALL Mathematics helps mathematics teachers in grades 6-12 engage in the critical practice of reasoning-and-proving and support the development of reasoning-and-proving in their students. The phrase "reasoning-and-proving" describes the processes of identifying patterns, making conjectures, and providing arguments that may or may not qualify as proofs – processes that reflect the work of mathematicians. Going beyond the idea of "formal proof" traditionally relegated only to geometry, this book transcends all mathematical content areas with a variety of activities for teachers to learn more about reasoning-and-proving and about how to support students’ capacities to engage in this mathematical thinking through: Solving and discussing high-level mathematical tasks Analyzing narrative cases that make the relationship between teaching and learning salient Examining and interpreting student work that features a range of solution strategies, representations, and misconceptions Modifying tasks from curriculum materials so that they better support students to reason-and-prove Evaluating learning environments and making connections between key ideas about reasoning-and-proving and teaching strategies We Reason & We Prove for ALL Mathematics is designed as a learning tool for practicing and pre-service mathematics teachers and can be used individually or in a group. No other book tackles reasoning-and-proving with such breadth, depth, and practical applicability. Classroom examples, case studies, and sample problems help to sharpen concrete teaching strategies that empower students to reason-and-prove!

This book explains and demonstrates the teaching strategy of asking learners to construct their own examples of mathematical objects. The authors show that the creation of examples can involve transforming and reorganizing knowledge and that, although this is usually done by authors and teachers, if the responsibility for making examples is transferred to learners, their knowledge structures can be developed and extended. A multitude of examples to illustrate this is provided, spanning primary, secondary, and college levels. Readers are invited to learn from their own past experience augmented by tasks provided in the book, and are given direct experience of constructing examples through a collection of many tasks at many levels. Classroom stories show the practicalities of introducing such shifts in mathematics education. The authors examine how their approach relates to improving the learning of mathematics and raise future research questions. *Based on the authors' and others' theoretical and practical experience, the book includes a combination of exercises for the reader, practical applications for teaching, and solid scholarly grounding. *The ideas presented are generic in nature and thus applicable across every phase of mathematics teaching and learning. *Although the teaching methods offered are ones that engage learners imaginatively, these are also applied to traditional approaches to mathematics education; all tasks offered in the book are within conventional mathematics curriculum content. Mathematics as a Constructive Activity: Learners Generating Examples is intended for mathematics teacher educators, mathematics teachers, curriculum developers, task and test designers, and classroom researchers, and for use as a text in graduate-level mathematics education courses.

This book brings together research and professional knowledge to enhance the teaching of lower attaining students in secondary mathematics. Attainment in mathematics is an important social issue, since underachievement can make a difference to future life choices, particularly amongst certain groups of students. Raising Achievement in Secondary Mathematics shows how well-meant teaching strategies and approaches can in practice exacerbate underachievement in maths by making inappropriate demands on learners. As well as criticizing some of the teaching and grouping practices that are considered normal in many schools, the book also offers an alternative view of attainment and capability, based on real classroom incidents in which ‘low attaining students’ show themselves to be able to think about mathematics in quite sophisticated ways. The author argues that teaching could be based on learners’ proficiency, rather than on correcting deficits in knowledge and behaviour. She describes how a group of teachers who believed that their students could do better with higher expectations developed a range of principles and strategies to support their work – the students showed significant progress and the teachers felt they were doing a better job. With numerous case studies, ideas and teaching strategies, this book is for anyone who is teaching, or learning to teach, mathematics.

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 1 presents research and theoretically informed perspectives on Knowledge and Beliefs in Mathematics Teaching and Teaching Development. The chapters together address the "what" of mathematics teacher education, meaning knowledge for mathematics teaching and teaching development and consideration of associated beliefs. As well as synthesising research and practice over various dimensions of these issues, the volume offers advice on 'best practice' for teacher educators, university decision makers, and those involved in systemic policy decisions on teacher education. There are four sections. The first, about mathematics discipline knowledge for teaching, contains chapters on mathematics discipline knowledge from both East Asian and Western perspectives, with separate chapters addressing primary/elementary teacher education and secondary teacher education, along with a chapter on approaches for assessing this mathematics knowledge of prospective teachers. The second section describes ways of thinking about how this mathematical knowledge is used in teaching. It includes chapters on pedagogical content knowledge, on knowledge for and about mathematics curriculum structures, the way that such knowledge can be fostered with practising teachers, on a cultural analysis of mathematical content knowledge, and on beliefs about mathematics and mathematics teaching. The third section outlines frameworks for researching issues of equity, diversity and culture in teaching mathematics. The fourth section contains a description of an approach to methods of researching mathematics discipline knowledge of teachers. Together the chapters not only confirm that the knowledge that mathematics teachers need includes both mathematical and pedagogical aspects but also explore the subtlety of the various dimensions of that knowledge. There are also suggestions of the relative emphases on the respective dimensions and ways that teacher educators might support prospective and practising teachers in acquiring and developing that knowledge. Bibliographical Information for the complete set: VOLUME 1: Knowledge and Beliefs in Mathematics Teaching and Teaching Development Peter Sullivan, Monash University, Clayton, Australia and Terry Wood, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA (eds. ) paperback: 978-90-8790-541-5, hardback: 978-90-8790-542-2, ebook: 978-90-8790-543-9 VOLUME 2: Tools and Processes in Mathematics Teacher Education Dina Tirosh, Tel Aviv University, Israel and Terry Wood, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA (eds. ) paperback: 978-90-8790-544-6, hardback: 978-90-8790-545-3, ebook: 978-90-8790-546-0 VOLUME 3: Participants in Mathematics Teacher Education: Individuals, Teams, Communities and Networks Konrad Krainer, University of Klagenfurt, Austria and Terry Wood, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA (eds. ) paperback: 978-90-8790-547-7, hardback: 978-90-8790-548-4, ebook: 978-90-8790-549-1 VOLUME 4: The Mathematics Teacher Educator as a Developing Professional Barbara Jaworski, Loughborough University, UK and Terry Wood, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA (eds. ) paperback: 978-90-8790-550-7, hardback: 978-90-8790-551-4, ebook: 978-90-8790-552-1

A perennial discussion about teacher development is the optimal content background for teachers. In recent years, that discussion has taken center stage in the work of mathematics education researchers, mathematicians, mathematics professional developers, and mathematics education policymakers. Much of the existing and prior work in this area has been directed toward mathematical knowledge for teaching at the elementary level. The work described in this volume takes a sometimes-neglected approach, focusing on the dynamic nature of mathematical understanding rather than on a stable description of mathematical knowledge, and on mathematics for secondary teaching rather than mathematics for teaching at the elementary level. The work reported in Mathematical Understanding for Secondary Teaching: A Framework and Classroom-Based Situations is a practice-based response to the question of what mathematical understandings secondary teachers could productively use in their teaching. For each of more than 50 events, our team of almost 50 mathematics educators who were experienced mathematics teachers developed descriptions of the mathematics that teachers could use—each of those descriptions (consisting of the event and the mathematics related to the event) is what we call a Situation. We developed our Framework for Mathematical Understanding for Secondary Teaching (MUST) based on an analysis of our entire set of Situations. We call the work practice-based because the MUST framework is based on actual events that we witnessed in our observations of secondary mathematics practice. Groups of mathematics teachers can use this volume to enhance their own understandings of secondary mathematics. School leaders and professional developers in secondary mathematics will find our MUST Framework and Situations useful as they work with teachers in enhancing and deepening their understanding of secondary mathematics. Mathematics teacher educators and mathematicians who teach mathematics to prospective and in-service secondary teachers will be able to couch their mathematical discussions in the Situations—examples that arise from secondary mathematics classrooms. They will be able to use this volume as they design courses and programs that enhance mathematics from the perspectives identified in the MUST framework. Policymakers and researchers can use our MUST framework as they consider the mathematics background needed by teachers.