Evaluating and Enhancing My Teaching: What Counts as Evidence?

My privilege and my challenge is to be a teacher educator with special responsibilities for teaching prospective primary schoolteachers how to become effective and enthusiastic teachers of mathematics. I have taught and researched in this area for over 18 years and it still continues to be a challenge. This chapter will explore the reasons for this challenge and also discuss how I came to use self-study of my practice as the process to guide my teaching and enhance it. I will discuss the way I use self-study to examine my practice, and describe the valuable insights afforded by self-study that have not been previously available to me through other means of evaluation. I will also discuss the characteristics of self-study that both make it appropriate and at the same time problematic as a process to evaluate my teaching.

Throughout my life as a teacher educator, I have found it important to share my approaches and activities with fellow academics. Consequently, I have written many papers about the interventions and projects I have conducted. This chapter includes an overview of many of these approaches as I consider how my self-study has developed and influenced my teaching. References for the papers, in which these approaches are discussed, are provided throughout the chapter.