This MTE editorial explores the importance of manuscripts informing the practice of mathematics teacher education.

 

 

Leading a whole-class mathematics discussion is complex work. The teacher must attend to and respond to student thinking while continually keeping the mathematical goals of the discussion in mind. This work is especially challenging for novice teachers who are just learning to facilitate classroom talk. The authors present a new sorting-task instructional activity designed to support novice secondary teachers in steering a discussion toward a mathematical point while eliciting and making use of student thinking.

Effective mathematics teaching involves eliciting and interpreting student thinking, and then using students’ current understandings as a basis for instruction. Research indicates these skills are not innate but can be acquired through structured experiences. In this article, we describe the development and implementation of an interview module aimed at supporting secondary preservice teachers’ ability to elicit and use evidence of student thinking. Analysis of preservice teachers’ noticing of student thinking across components of the interview module demonstrated positive benefits of the assignment. We share our design considerations and results, and offer potential adaptations to the module for other mathematics methods instructors interested in using the module to develop secondary preservice teachers’ ability to notice student thinking.

Researchers have called on teacher educators to break down complex teaching practices to assist preservice teachers in learning these practices. In this article, we unpack the practice of probing student thinking while providing evidence that as sophisticated users of various teaching practices, mathematics teacher educators may be unaware of preservice teachers’ varied and naïve images and understandings of teaching practices.

Mathematics teacher educators play a critical role in translating research findings into frameworks that are useful for mathematics teachers in their daily practice. In this article, we describe the development of a representation that brings together four research-based learning trajectories on number and operations. We detail our design process, present the ways in which we shared this representation with teachers during a professional development project, and provide evidence of the ways teachers used this translation of research into a pedagogical tool to make sense of students’ mathematics. We conclude with revisions to the representation based on our analysis and discuss the role of mathematics teacher educators in translating research findings into useful tools for teachers.