Professional Development

Science education stakeholders worldwide are engaged in efforts to support teachers' noticing and making sense of students' thinking in science. Here we introduce the design of a science teaching video club and present a study of its implementation. The current design extends prior research on video clubs as a form of professional development for supporting mathematics teachers. Results indicate that the current design supported science teachers in noticing and discussing students' thinking in sustained and meaningful ways.

The study examines geometry teachers' video club discussions in a two-year professional development intervention that combined lesson study, video clubs, and animation discussions to promote teacher noticing of students' prior knowledge. Most discussions pertained to student conceptions (78%), followed by pedagogy (19%). Discussion of students' prior knowledge surfaced only when talking about student conceptions or pedagogy.

Lee, J., Kim, J-H., Kim, S-M., & Lim, W. (2018). How to envision equitable mathematics instruction: Views of U.S. and Korean preservice teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education, 69, 275–288. doi: 10.1016/j.tate.2017.10.010

González, G. (2018). Moving toward approximations of practice in teacher professional development: Learning to summarize a problem-based lesson. In R. Zazkis, & P. Herbst (Eds.), Scripting approaches in mathematics education: Mathematical dialogues in research and practice (pp. 115–146). New York, NY: Springer.

We discuss affordances and liabilities of using a storyboard to depict a written case of a teacher’s dilemma that involves race, opportunity to learn, and student community. We rely on reflections by the teacher educator who authored the written case and later depicted it as a storyboard to use it with his preservice teachers (PSTs).

This chapter focuses on the design of simulation assessments to learn about pre-service teachers’ capabilities with eliciting and interpreting student thinking. We present a simulation assessment and show what a performance on that assessment can reveal about a pre-service teacher’s eliciting and interpreting skills, as well as their mathematical knowledge for teaching. We consider the specific design features that make it possible to appraise pre-service teachers’ capabilities.

In this chapter, we examine what aspects of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching of Proving (MKT-P) can be observed in written scenarios of classroom interactions, produced by pre-service teachers (PSTs) of mathematics. A group of 27 elementary and middle school PSTs completed an online interactive module, intended to trigger reflection on, and crystallization of their knowledge of the roles of examples in proving.

Although teacher education is the formal means by which novices are prepared for teaching, they come having already had significant experience in schools. Preservice teachers have formed habits of “teaching” which influence their learning to teach. This article reports a study of the specific knowledge of and skills with teaching practice that novices bring to teacher education with respect to one teaching practice, eliciting student thinking in elementary mathematics, and describes the use of a standardized teaching simulation to learn about novices’ skills.

We describe a four-step strategy used in our professional development program to help elementary science teachers recognize and create lesson plans with coherent conceptual storylines. The conceptual storyline of a lesson refers to sequencing its scientific concepts and activities to help students develop a main scientific idea and, often, is an implicit component of a lesson plan.

Amidon, J., Chazan, D., Grosser-Clarkson, D., & Fleming, E. (2017). Meet me in Azul’s room: Designing a virtual field placement for learning to teach mathematics. Mathematics Teacher Educator, 6(1), 52–66. DOI10.5951/mathteaceduc.6.1.0052