What is most needed in research on mathematics teacher education?

What would you say is most needed in research on mathematics teacher education? I pondered this in relation to an application recently. I immediately thought back to the 2005 review of research on mathematics teacher education by Adler, Ball, Krainer, Lin, and Novotna. They found the field characterized by “a predominance of small scale qualitative studies (how); teacher educators studying their own contexts (who); and a predominance of publications from countries where English is a national language” (p. 375).

Not much seems different 14 years later, if I must judge based on a current review of research on the role of practicum in mathematics teacher education, conducted within the TRACE project – except that Turkey seems to be doing a fair amount of research in the field.

Pondering our work on the desired teacher and work both in mathematics teacher education and teacher education more generally, I contemplated if a connecting focus could be the development of the new teachers' professional judgement. Perhaps like this?


Why these particular satellite topics?

As argued in the TRACE project, teacher education would benefit from a critical reflection on its applicability by improving our understanding of how teachers utilise learning from teacher education in their profession. Hence the dimension ‘tracing teacher education’.

International research has focused on student teachers, practising teachers, and even teacher educators learning to better notice learner thinking (e.g., Amador & Carter, 2016; Walkoe, Sherin, & Elby, 2019). This is utilised in formative assessment.

Key in professional judgement is the consideration of the context of learners and students. With the population diversification in Sweden, socio-cultural issues need to be addressed in teacher education. This applies equally to what student teachers learn about this, and to the approaches of teacher education itself. However, there is very limited international research on this in relation to mathematics teacher education. 

Our review of research on the practicum indicated that the quality of mentoring is vital to student teachers’ learning. The same review pointed to the importance of the meeting between theory and practice. However, research on ways to facilitate this meeting is diffuse, and the notion of theory within the field is extremely vague.

There are good indication that engagement with the visions of good teaching and a critical engagement with the nature of mathematics are pivotal to student teacher learning (Corey, Peterson, Lewis, & Bukarau, 2010; Jankvist, Clark, & Mosvold, 2019).

There is much to continue contemplating ...

Iben

References

Amador, J. M., & Carter, I. S. (2016). Audible conversational affordances and constraints of verbalizing professional noticing during prospective teacher lesson study. Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10857-016-9347-x 

Corey, D. L., Peterson, B. E., Lewis, B. M., & Bukarau, J. (2010). Are There Any Places that Students Use Their Heads? Principles of High-Quality Japanese Mathematics Instruction. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 41(5), 438-478.

Jankvist, U. T., Clark, K. M., & Mosvold, R. (2019). Developing mathematical knowledge for teaching teachers: potentials of history of mathematics in teacher educator training. Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 1-22.

Walkoe, J., Sherin, M., & Elby, A. (2019). Video tagging as a window into teacher noticing. Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 1-21.

The normative in educational research – who is the ‘desired teacher’?

We research how to facilitate learning. In the case of mathematics teacher education, we research how to facilitate student teachers’ learning how to facilitate learners’ learning of mathematics. Any answer to such questions have directly or indirectly worked from a vision of what is meant by ‘learning’, ‘mathematics’, ‘teaching’. Hence, it seems to me impossible that teacher education, and research on same, can be separated from a normative dimension.

What I got curious about is the extent to which the underlying notion of mathematics is the same. In my research youth, I explored what it meant to change the content of the mathematics class to be about authentic modelling with mathematics. I read Sfard’s book on Thinking as Communication. I pondered the philosophy of mathematics. I read Dowling’s the Sociology of Mathematics Education and Mellin-Olsen's the Politics of Mathematics Education, and thought about what mathematics learners could fairly be said to need to learn (or benefit from learning). I read Skovsmose’s Towards a Philosophy of Critical Mathematics Education and reflected on different kinds of reflections.

Then I got in with some teacher educators. And over time, my questions started to include what we actually assume about good teaching. What is the ‘desired teacher’ of our curricula? Teacher education materials? Assessments?

Recently, I had the great joy that two colleagues agreed to do some empirical work on this. We collected some observation protocols used to assess student teachers during their practicum – thinking this would give a fairly strong indication what universities or national education departments value in teachers. We stole some earlier ideas the way researchers should and altered them to fit our purpose, and then we coded. Statement for statement.

In all the cases, our analysis suggests that the desired teacher is not a technician implementing given approaches unreflectively as has been suggested in some of the discussions of developments in teacher education. Neither was the ‘born teacher’ part of the picture – teaching and good teaching is a practice that must be learned.

That said, there were substantial differences between the various observation protocols. So substantial that we suggested four different types of ‘ideal teacher’ reflected in the documents: the knowledgeable teacher, the constantly improving teacher, the successful teacher, and the knowledge-transforming teacher. And we added one which we only saw traces of in the literature: the inspired teacher.

Now we look forward to seeing to what extent these can be analytical categories in their own right. And to what extent they can help us shape the discussions around what 'desired teacher' we want teacher education programmes to convey.