A group of mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) began a lesson study to develop a research-based lesson to engage elementary preservice teachers with professional teacher noticing within the context of multidigit multiplication. Afterward, MTEs continued teaching and revising the lesson, developing an integrated process that combined lesson study with the continuous improvement model. This article introduces the continuous improvement lesson study process, shares an example of how the process was used, and discusses how the process serves as a collaborative professional development model for MTEs across institutions.
Lara K. Dick, Mollie H. Appelgate, Dittika Gupta, and Melissa M. Soto
Emily Elrod, Emily Elrod, and Valerie Faulkner
This editorial explores relationships between reviewers and authors within the Mathematics Teacher Educator community and provides reasons why and ideas for how to write a strong review.
Why take on the role of reviewer? That is a question we have asked ourselves as we generate emails asking our peers to do just that. Why do we spend our time reviewing other people’s work? Perhaps we have a sense of obligation, a sense of fairness or duty: “Others have reviewed my work; I need to put in my time." This, perhaps, draws us in. But, from there, we hope many of you find there is something more, something special, in the process.
Jared Webb and P. Holt Wilson
ABSTRACT
In this article, we describe rehearsals designed for use in professional development (PD) with secondary mathematics teachers to support them in reimagining and refining their practice. We detail a theoretical framework for learning in PD that informs our rehearsal design. We then share evidence of secondary mathematics teachers’ improvements in classroom practice from a broader study examining their participation in a PD that featured the use of rehearsals and provide examples of the ways two teachers’ rehearsals of the practice of monitoring students’ engagement with mathematics corresponded to changes in their practice. We conclude with a set of considerations and revisions to our design and a discussion of the role of mathematics teacher educators in supporting teachers in expanding their practice toward more ambitious purposes for students’ mathematical learning.
Megan H. Wickstrom
Preservice elementary teachers (PSTs) often enter their teacher preparation programs with procedural and underdeveloped understandings of area measurement and its applications. This is problematic given that area and the area model are used throughout K–Grade 12 to develop flexibility in students’ mathematical understanding and to provide them with a visual interpretation of numerical ideas. This study describes an intervention aimed at bolstering PSTs’ understanding of area and area units with respect to measurement and number and operations. Following the intervention, results indicate that PSTs had both an improved ability to solve area tiling tasks as well as increased flexibility in the strategies they implemented. The results indicate that PSTs, similar to elementary students, develop a conceptual understanding of area from the use of tangible tools and are able to leverage visualizations to make sense of multiplicative structure across different strategies.
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Amy Lucenta and Grace Kelemanik
Teaching students to apply structural thinking instead of automatically following procedures and algorithms can result in efficient, elegant strategies and fewer errors.
Lara Jasien and Ilana Horn
We build on mathematicians’ descriptions of their work and conceptualize mathematics as an aesthetic endeavor. Invoking the anthropological meaning of practice, we claim that mathematical aesthetic practices shape meanings of and appreciation (or distaste) for particular manifestations of mathematics. To see learners’ spontaneous mathematical aesthetic practices, we situate our study in an informal context featuring design-centered play with mathematical objects. Drawing from video data that support inferences about children’s perspectives, we use interaction analysis to examine one child’s mathematical aesthetic practices, highlighting the emergence of aesthetic problems whose resolution required engagement in mathematics sense making. As mathematics educators seek to broaden access, our empirical findings challenge commonsense understandings about what and where mathematics is, opening possibilities for designs for learning.
Richard A. Andrusiak and Antonella Perucca
Growing Problem Solvers provides four original, related, classroom-ready mathematical tasks, one for each grade band. Together, these tasks illustrate the trajectory of learners’ growth as problem solvers across their years of school mathematics.
