Initial Mathematics Teacher Education: Comments and Reflections

Abstract

Mathematics teacher preparation is always a formidable task in practical mathematics teacher education and is a significant concern in mathematics education in general. Thus, the section entitled “Initial Mathematics Teacher Education” will be attractive to many scholars in this area. From the introduction, “Overview of teacher education systems across the world”, readers obtain a clear and comprehensive overview of current systems in use by different countries and school districts around the world and are also exposed to the different features of a variety of systems as well as the explicit and implied ideas and beliefs behind them. The longer and more detailed descriptions and comments provide us with a broad background and comprehensive information that will assist us in better understanding those chapters with special themes. In the chapters under the topic “Student teachers’ experiences and early years of teaching”, the authors report research on university pre-service teachers, student teachers, and new mathematics teachers; the relationship between university learning and “real-live” teaching; and the relationship between the theoretical and practical aspects of teaching and learning. Such a relationship constitutes a vital link in the chain of initial pre-service training sessions for mathematics teachers. Thus, the theoretical and practical combined analysis, for example, of the Zone of Proximal Development, the Zone of Free Movement, and the Zone of Promoted Action (Goos, this volume) is very important, and I hope it will serve as an exemplar of similar research. The section entitled “Mathematics educators’ activities and knowledge” especially caught my eye. From this we learn that at the preliminary stage, people usually pay more attention to the external aim they expect to achieve. It is only when they have successfully gone farther that they wish to improve themselves by pursuing higher and newer objectives. I optimistically view the theme on teacher educators’ development as representing the progression of research on mathematics teacher education. I mainly comment on chapters in this section, but some views may apply to the chapters under “Student teachers’ experiences and early years of teaching”. As Zaslavsky and Peled (2007) suggest, there is much in common with