The Common Core State Standards for Mathematical Practice asks students to look for and make use of structure. Hence, mathematics teacher educators need to prepare teachers to support students’ structural reasoning. In this article, we present tasks and rubrics designed and validated to characterize teachers’ structural reasoning for the purposes of professional development. Initially, tasks were designed and improved using interviews and small pilot studies. Next, we gave written structure tasks to over 600 teachers in two countries and developed and validated rubrics to categorize responses. Our work contributes to the preparation and support of mathematics teachers as they develop their own structural reasoning and their ability to help students develop structural reasoning.
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Characterizing Secondary Teachers’ Structural Reasoning
Stacy Musgrave, Cameron Byerley, Neil Hatfield, Surani Joshua, and Hyunkyoung Yoon
Are We Preparing Agents of Change or Instruments of Inequity? Teaching Toward Antiracist Mathematics Teacher Education
Joel Amidon, Anne Marie Marshall, and Rebecca E. Smith
The authors began this work with the understandings that (a) there is no “neutral” when it comes to the teaching of mathematics, and (b) mathematics teacher educators need to do something to help produce teachers of mathematics that develop students’ relationships with mathematics and push against the inequities that exist both within and outside of the classrooms in which they will teach. In response, the authors created, deployed, and studied a learning module in an attempt to enact antiracist mathematics teacher education. The learning module activities, the findings about the learning from the prospective teachers who engaged in the module, and messages for mathematics teacher educators who want to engage in this work are shared.
How Big Is a Leaf? Mathematical Modeling Through STEM Inquiry
Kym Fry and Lyn D. English
Grade 4 students engage in problem solving through inquiry in an agricultural science context.
