This editorial discusses the evidence that is appropriate for articles in Mathematics Teacher Educator .

A group of preservice teachers acquire an understanding of “how” and “why” parents and children work together in mathematics the way they do. The literature that supports the need for inquiry into parent-child collaborations in mathematics is followed by descriptions concerning the participants, learning environment, modes of inquiry, findings, and their implications for teacher practice.

Helping prospective elementary school teachers (PSTs) recognize that they have something useful to learn from university mathematics courses remains a constant challenge. The authors found that an initial content interview with the PSTs often led to the PSTs’ changing their beliefs about mathematics and about their understanding of mathematics, leading to the recognition that (a) there is something to learn beyond procedures, (b) their own knowledge is limited and they need to know more to be able to teach, and (c) engaging in the mathematical activities in their content courses will lead them to learning important content.

Teachers who continually engage in cycles of research may be characterized as having a stance of inquiry: they continually reflect on their past teaching, ask themselves questions to problematize their current practices, and collect and analyze data to inform future teaching practices. We guided 154 mathematics teachers, distributed across six cohorts, in conducting classroom research projects. Our purposes and expectations as teacher educators have become more clearly defined and articulated based on our reflections on six iterations of teacher research. Repeatedly, we have adjusted how we facilitated the design and implementation of the projects to improve the quality of teachers’ research. Over time, we have come to understand teacher research as a way of helping teachers develop a stance of inquiry toward mathematical content, students’ mathematical understandings, and productive mathematical teaching practices.

Two technology-involved tasks are presented that have been used in mathematics pedagogy courses to ostensibly give preservice secondary mathematics teachers (PSMTs) sample activities they can use in their teaching or use to assess their own future students' ability to apply trigonometric functions in contextual situations with technology. The tasks are posed for two other purposes: To provide occasions for PSMTs to self-assess their mathematical and technology knowledge, and subsequently take action to learn mathematics and technology features; and to use such tasks as springboards for substantive discussions about teaching.

The two videos mentioned in the article are available below.

Engaging prospective secondary teachers in mathematical argumentation is important so that they can learn to engage their own students in creating and critiquing arguments. Often, when we attempt to engage prospective secondary teachers in argumentation around topics from secondary mathematics classes, the argumentation is not authentic, as they believe they already know the answers. There are problems related to the secondary curriculum around which students can be engaged in authentic argumentation, one of them is whether 0.999… = 1.

The authors describe their ongoing efforts to design materials to support secondary mathematics teachers in using a set of Teacher Discourse Moves purposefully to develop classroom discourse that is both productive and powerful for students’ learning.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) and the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE) seek applications for editor of their joint online journal Mathematics Teacher Educator for a term beginning May 2014. The application deadline is August 31, 2013.

Mathematics Teacher MT MT

Download the entire Issue of Mathematics Teacher Educator as a single PDF. Individual articles available below.