Based on our interviews with instructors that teach math education courses across the MTH (2 course supervisors, and 1 instructor) and TE (2 course supervisors, 1 instructor) departments we learned that all three courses focus most prominently on the practice of posing mathematics problems and interpreting students’ mathematics. We also learned that the practice of responding, however, is not studied at all in the MTH 201 course, and receives moderate attention in the last course (TE 801) of the math ed course sequence. This finding was also confirmed when the analysis was performed on the course texts and syllabi. We suspect that this is likely the case in other teacher preparation programs.
The P-I-R script generation tasks elicit an enactment of teaching practice that is more dynamic (than static). They elicit an imagined enactment that has a longer timeframe than an enactment that is suspended or frozen in time. We expect that the generated scripts from the participants in the project will tell us something about PIR practices that the other more static tasks do not. We hypothesize that the scripts of those farther along in the program will look different than the scripts from those students who had just started their formal study of mathematics teaching.
Crespo, S., Oslund, J., Brakoniecki, A., Lawrence, A., Thorpe, J. (in Press). Learning to interpret students’ mathematical work: Studying (and mapping) preservice teachers’ practices. Proceedings of the 31st annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the Psychology of Mathematics Education. Atlanta, GA: Georgia State University.
Brakoniecki, A. (In Press). Mathematical knowledge for teaching exhibited by preservice teachers in responding to mathematical and pedagogical contexts. Proceedings of the 31st annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the Psychology of Mathematics Education. Atlanta, GA: Georgia State University.
Crespo, S., Oslund, J. A., & Parks, A. (2007) Studying elementary preservice teachers' learning of mathematics teaching: preliminary insights. (pp. 975-982). In Lamberg, T., & Wiest, L. R. (Eds.). Proceedings of the 29th annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, Lake Tahoe, NV: University of Nevada, Reno.
The project has generated a new sort of instrument and task items for the study of math teaching practice. Additionally the project generated its own classroom observation and interview protocols. The project is also generating pedagogical applications of some of the project tasks to be used as instructional tools with pre-service and in-service teachers.