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Teaching experiments and professional development

Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education volume 11, pages 285–305 (2008)Cite this article

Abstract

The challenge that we address concerns teachers’ shifts toward student-centered instruction. We report on a yearlong professional development study in which two United States elementary school teachers engaged in a teaching experiment, as described by Steffe and Thompson (in: Lesh and Kelly (eds) Research on design in mathematics and science education, 2000). The teaching experiment involved close mathematical interactions with a pair of students after school, in the context of solving fractions tasks. By conducting a teaching experiment, we anticipated that each teacher would have more opportunity to develop insight into students’ mathematics. We also anticipated that these insights would influence the teachers’ classroom practice, even without explicit support for such a shift. Indeed, the teachers found that they began asking more probing questions of their students and spending more time listening to students’ explanations, but shifts to classroom practice were limited by constraining factors such an inflexible curriculum.

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Acknowledgments

A Maris M. Proffitt and Mary Higgins Proffitt Endowment Grant and Summer Faculty Fellowship funded the research reported here. We thank Amy Hackenberg and Signe Kastberg for their responses to earlier drafts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics, Virginia Tech, 434 McBryde, Blacksburg, VA, 24061-0123, USA

    Anderson Hassell Norton

  2. Curriculum and Instruction, School of Education, Room 3274, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, 47405, USA

    Andrea McCloskey

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  1. Anderson Hassell Norton
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  2. Andrea McCloskey
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Correspondence to Anderson Hassell Norton.

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Norton, A.H., McCloskey, A. Teaching experiments and professional development. J Math Teacher Educ 11, 285–305 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10857-008-9076-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10857-008-9076-x

Keywords

  • Elementary mathematics teacher education
  • Fractions
  • Models and modeling
  • Professional development
  • Scheme theory
  • Students’ mathematics
  • Study group
  • Teaching experiment
  • Textbooks