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Instructional quality of two beginning mathematics teachers for three years: what professional competency makes a difference?

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Abstract

Mathematics teaching is challenging particularly for teachers who have just started their careers. Research on this sort of teacher has focused separately on their knowledge, identity, or instructional quality. Yet, teaching mathematics as a profession requires synthetic and comprehensive competency. To fill this gap, this study investigates the relationship between changes in instructional quality and professional competency for teaching mathematics in terms of knowledge, skills, and identity. The current study recruited two beginning mathematics teachers who had the same teacher education backgrounds and worked at the same high school. We collected and analyzed video and audio recordings of their instruction and meetings and interviews about instruction. The findings reveal how their instructional quality changed during the first 3 years of teaching in addition to their heterogeneous professional competency for teaching mathematics. While both had high levels of mathematical knowledge for teaching, they differed in the extent of their skills for ambitious teaching and identity concerning mathematics instruction. Based on the findings, we argue that teacher education needs to value all aspects for professional competency synthetically, for indeed possessing mathematical knowledge alone is insufficient for a high quality of instruction. We also discuss approaches in teacher education about skills and identity for teaching mathematics.

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Notes

  1. All names in this manuscript are pseudonyms.

  2. These have been validly used in the South Korea context in S. Kim (2016) and Y. Kim (2020).

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Acknowledgements

Mimi Park and Yeon Kim share first authorship in this manuscript. We would like to express sincere thanks for the three anonymous reviewers and editor whose comments and suggestions helped improve and clarify this manuscript.

Funding

This study was partially funded by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2020S1A5A8044078).

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  1. Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation, Jincheon, South Korea

    Mimi Park

  2. Silla University, Busan, South Korea

    Yeon Kim

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Park, M., Kim, Y. Instructional quality of two beginning mathematics teachers for three years: what professional competency makes a difference?. Educ Stud Math 112, 505–529 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-022-10195-9

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