Teacher education seeks to transform prospective and/or practicing teachers from neophyte possibly uncritical perspectives on teaching and learning to more knowledgeable, adaptable, analytic, insightful, observant, resourceful, reflective and confident professionals ready to address whatever challenges teaching secondary mathematics presents. This transformation occurs optimally through constructive engagement in tasks that foster knowledge for teaching secondary mathematics. Ideally such tasks provide a bridge between theory and practice, and challenge, surprise, disturb, confront, extend, or provoke examination of alternatives, drawn from the context of teaching. We define tasks as the problems or activities that, having been developed, evaluated and refined over time, are posed to teacher education participants. Such participants are expected to engage in these tasks collaboratively, energetically, and intellectually with an open mind and an orientation to future practice. The tasks might be similar to those used by classroom teachers (e.g., the analysis of a graphing problem) or idiosyncratic to teacher education (e.g., critique of videotaped practice). This edited volume includes chapters based around unifying themes of tasks used in secondary mathematics teacher education. These themes reflect goals for mathematics teacher education, and are closely related to various aspects of knowledge required for teaching secondary mathematics. They are not based on the conventional content topics of teacher education (e.g., decimals, grouping practices), but on broad goals such as adaptability, identifying similarities, productive disposition, overcoming barriers, micro simulations, choosing tools, and study of practice. This approach is innovative and appeals both to prominent authors and to our target audiences.

Building Support for Scholarly Practices in Mathematics Methods is the product of collaborations among over 40 mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) who teach mathematics methods courses for prospective PreK?12 teachers in many different institutional contexts and structures. Each chapter unpacks ways in which MTEs use theoretical perspectives to inform their construction of goals, activities designed to address those goals, facilitation of activities, and ways in which MTEs make sense of experiences prospective teachers have as a result. The book is organized in seven sections that highlight how the theoretical perspective of the instructor impacts scholarly inquiry and practice. The final section provides insight as we look backward to reflect, and forward with excitement, moving with the strength of the variation we found in our stories and the feeling of solidarity that results in our understandings of purposes for and insight into teaching mathematics methods. This book can serve as a resource for MTEs as they discuss and construct scholarly practices and as they undertake scholarly inquiry as a means to systematically examine their practice.

The quality of primary and secondary school mathematics teaching is generally agreed to depend crucially on the subject-related knowledge of the teacher. However, there is increasing recognition that effective teaching calls for distinctive forms of subject-related knowledge and thinking. Thus, established ways of conceptualizing, developing and assessing mathematical knowledge for teaching may be less than adequate. These are important issues for policy and practice because of longstanding difficulties in recruiting teachers who are confident and conventionally well-qualified in mathematics, and because of rising concern that teaching of the subject has not adapted sufficiently. The issues to be examined in Mathematical Knowledge in Teaching are of considerable significance in addressing global aspirations to raise standards of teaching and learning in mathematics by developing more effective approaches to characterizing, assessing and developing mathematical knowledge for teaching.

A thinking student is an engaged student Teachers often find it difficult to implement lessons that help students go beyond rote memorization and repetitive calculations. In fact, institutional norms and habits that permeate all classrooms can actually be enabling "non-thinking" student behavior. Sparked by observing teachers struggle to implement rich mathematics tasks to engage students in deep thinking, Peter Liljedahl has translated his 15 years of research into this practical guide on how to move toward a thinking classroom. Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K–12 helps teachers implement 14 optimal practices for thinking that create an ideal setting for deep mathematics learning to occur. This guide Provides the what, why, and how of each practice and answers teachers’ most frequently asked questions Includes firsthand accounts of how these practices foster thinking through teacher and student interviews and student work samples Offers a plethora of macro moves, micro moves, and rich tasks to get started Organizes the 14 practices into four toolkits that can be implemented in order and built on throughout the year When combined, these unique research-based practices create the optimal conditions for learner-centered, student-owned deep mathematical thinking and learning, and have the power to transform mathematics classrooms like never before.

This book provides a panorama of complimentary and forward looking perspectives on the learning of mathematics and epistemology from some of the leading contributors to the field. It explores constructivist and social theories of learning, and discusses the role of the computer in the light of these theories. It brings analyses from psychoanalysis, Hermeneutics and other perspectives to bear on the issues of mathematics and learning. It enquires into the nature of enquiry itself, and an important emergent theme is the role of language. Finally it relates the history of mathematics to its teaching and learning. The book both surveys current research and indicates orientations for fruitful work in the future.

The audience remains much the same as for the 1992 Handbook, namely, mathematics education researchers and other scholars conducting work in mathematics education. This group includes college and university faculty, graduate students, investigators in research and development centers, and staff members at federal, state, and local agencies that conduct and use research within the discipline of mathematics. The intent of the authors of this volume is to provide useful perspectives as well as pertinent information for conducting investigations that are informed by previous work. The Handbook should also be a useful textbook for graduate research seminars. In addition to the audience mentioned above, the present Handbook contains chapters that should be relevant to four other groups: teacher educators, curriculum developers, state and national policy makers, and test developers and others involved with assessment. Taken as a whole, the chapters reflects the mathematics education research community's willingness to accept the challenge of helping the public understand what mathematics education research is all about and what the relevance of their research fi ndings might be for those outside their immediate community.

Mathematics is generally considered as the only science where knowledge is uni form, universal, and free from contradictions. „Mathematics is a social product - a 'net of norms', as Wittgenstein writes. In contrast to other institutions - traffic rules, legal systems or table manners -, which are often internally contradictory and are hardly ever unrestrictedly accepted, mathematics is distinguished by coherence and consensus. Although mathematics is presumably the discipline, which is the most differentiated internally, the corpus of mathematical knowledge constitutes a coher ent whole. The consistency of mathematics cannot be proved, yet, so far, no contra dictions were found that would question the uniformity of mathematics" (Heintz, 2000, p. 11). The coherence of mathematical knowledge is closely related to the kind of pro fessional communication that research mathematicians hold about mathematical knowledge. In an extensive study, Bettina Heintz (Heintz 2000) proposed that the historical development of formal mathematical proof was, in fact, a means of estab lishing a communicable „code of conduct" which helped mathematicians make themselves understood in relation to the truth of mathematical statements in a co ordinated and unequivocal way.