Mapping the Way to Content Knowledge

The role of teacher education is to initiate purposeful conversation regarding specific content, to provide the scaffold for which preservice teachers can begin to understand the subject matter for the purpose of teaching, and to acknowledge gaps in their conceptual knowledge (Grossman and Shoenfeld with Lee 2005). Teacher candidates may enter elementary education programs with basic understanding of whole-number operations but without understanding deeper connections. Building true conceptual understanding requires that individuals learn to make meaningful connections between mathematical concepts. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) Connections Process Standard emphasizes the need to “recognize and use connections among mathematical ideas; and understand how mathematical ideas interconnect and build on one another to produce a coherent whole” (2000, p. 64). Solidifying connections between concepts and content must be at the forefront of instructing preservice teacher candidates. A learning tool that we have found irreplaceable to reveal these connections is a visual representation created by the learner: a concept map.