Abstract
Some goals of mathematics teacher education include ensuring that pre-service teachers (PSTs) have strong content knowledge, the skill to anticipate and interpret student thinking, the ability to plan how to respond, and the ability to critically select resources for instruction. These goals are especially challenging for the topic of geometric shapes. Thus, we share an instructional activity that focuses PSTs’ attention on an inaccurate resource of geometric information, children’s books, to accomplish these goals in mathematics content as well as methods courses. Analyses of surveys and content assessments conducted to assess efficacy of the Shape Book Critique Activity were interpreted with the Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (MKT) framework. Based on the findings we suggest that this short 40-minute activity is a promising way to promote PSTs’ growth in three aspects of MKT for geometric shapes.
Highlights
AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKMathematics teacher educators have the unique challenge of ensuring that pre-service teachers (PSTs) have strong content knowledge as well as the skills to anticipate, interpret, and respond to student thinking
The first author conducted an in-depth content analysis of children’s shape books. These data were used in practice for a decade to develop and repeatedly revise the rubric-centered professional development activity reported here to encourage in-service teachers to confront the inaccuracies in published books as a way to develop their Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching, the content analysis of the books themselves was published only recently (Nurnberger-Haag, 2017)
Prior to reporting how well the activity addressed the three aspects of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching, we provide an overview of PSTs’ perceptions based on the 397 survey responses that were collected
Summary
AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKMathematics teacher educators have the unique challenge of ensuring that pre-service teachers (PSTs) have strong content knowledge as well as the skills to anticipate, interpret, and respond to student thinking. Once the teacher convinced her colleagues to accept that a hierarchical definition of a rectangle was mathematically valid (e.g., de Villiers, 1994), they argued that this idea was inappropriate for the elementary students they served; rather, they believed children had to learn a partitive definition This exchange served as a catalyst to conduct a line of research focused on early sources of peoples’ mathematics concepts, and in this manuscript we use the anecdote of this exchange to aid the reader to think about the theoretical framework of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching in a way that is relevant to the current study.
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