Perceptions of professional growth: A mathematics teacher educator in transition

School Science and Mathematics, Mar 2003 by Timmerman, Maria A

2. Recruitment of a classroom teacher. A second event in my professional growth occurred when I collaborated with the College of Arts and Sciences and the local county public schools to create a teacher-inresidence position. A fifth-grade teacher from a nearby school became a co-teacher in the methods course. As an on-site classroom teacher, she often adapted and presented textbook mathematics lessons aligned with the NCTM Standards (1989, 2000) and Virginia Standards of Learning (Commonwealth of Virginia, 1995) that she and other teachers used in their teaching. The prospective teachers learned how some teachers in the county adapted specific lessons to make connections to the state standards across the curriculum. In some instances, we cotaught and demonstrated inquiry-based lessons, which were followed by discussions ofhow we planned for what the subsequent activity would be, based on both the mathematics content and the sequential development of children's thinking. Thus, the teacher-- in-residence and I established a pedagogical model for prospective teachers to use in grade-level or team planning sessions when they become teachers. The teacher-in-residence provided new insights for the prospective teachers about their future teacher role as a collaborator with parents, other teachers, and school administrators.

3. Peer teaching team. Although I desired more opportunities for the prospective teachers to work in their field experiences teaching mathematics, I found that the current work and time expectations for the prospective teachers in the field precluded any additional time requirement in the schools. To circumvent the lack of a field experience directly connected to the methods course, each prospective teacher was assigned to a three-person teaching team. Each team taught an exploration from Bassarear's (1997) problem-solving text in a 25-minute lesson. I chose this text because the lesson explorations focus on mathematics as inquiry, which encourages the use of different strategies to solve problems and discussion of mathematical ideas. Typically, the team lessons used at least 40 minutes of 8 to 10 class sessions, because we also engaged in a whole-class analysis of each lesson after it was taught. The prospective teachers experienced a cycle of teaching through collaboratively planning, implementing, and analyzing a lesson.

The peer teaching has contributed to both the prospective teachers' and my professional development. I had used this assignment in prior years, but found that not connecting a lesson to rich mathematical content often circumvented discussions of mathematical reasoning in the teaching of their lessons. After-lesson discussions seemed to center more on different activities that could be used with a lesson, rather than discussing teacher decisions and strategies for implementing mathematical tasks. However, using the problem-solving explorations demanded that the prospective teachers make explicit their understanding of the mathematical content. In order to develop reform-based mathematics instruction, the prosepctive terachers needed to Analyze the mathematical content of the various problems contained in each exploration.