The Growth of Teacher’s Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching as Participating in a Primary School Teacher’s Professional Learning Community

Abstract

Teacher’s Professional Learning Community (PLC) should effectively operate through sharing teaching resources, professional dialogues, and collaboration to reduce pupil’s learning achievement gaps and make teaching close to their learning experiences through providing learning scaffolding. This study adopts a qualitative research method to investigate the change of participants’ Mathematics Knowledge for Teaching (MKT) of a primary school teacher PLC which has been running for three years. The three research subjects are experienced teachers and none of whom are mathematics or science majors. According to the framework of the MKT (Hill et al. 2008), the qualitative data which include PLC meeting videos, lesson observation sheets, interviews, and learning feedback are analyzed and triangulated by the researchers and other mathematics educators. The results show that PLC may help teachers improve their MKT. At the beginning of the PLC, the discourse was mainly related to the teacher’s Knowledge of Special Content Knowledge (SCK) and Knowledge of Content and Teaching (KCT). It reveals that the participants ought to be energized in SCK and KCT, and the PLC activities should be specially arranged in these two aspects. After the continuous professional dialogue and teaching practices, the teacher’s KCC, Knowledge of Content and Student (KCS), and Special Content Knowledge (SCK) are improved most significantly, which also promotes the student learning achievements. Keywords: mathematics teaching, teacher professional development, teacher professional learning community, mathematics knowledge for teaching