What teachers understand of model lessons

Abstract

Over the past two decades, researchers in mathematics teacher education have identified characteristics of high quality professional development (PD). This report describes an investigation of a common approach to PD with secondary mathematics teachers, providing teachers with opportunities to experience reform-oriented model lessons as students of the lesson’s mathematics. Teachers experienced a lesson, as students, on the design of displays of statistical data as a method to investigate statistical questions. The investigation then examined the ways in which teachers assimilated the lesson by having them attempt to reconstruct the lesson for their own use. The author points to ways in which teachers’ current meanings and ways of thinking about statistics in particular, and mathematics in general, interfered with their ability to create a coherent reconstruction of the lesson and identifies two potential sources that account for the difficulties teachers exhibited in their attempts to reconstruct the lesson.

Keywords

• mathematics education
• professional development
• teacher cognition
• mathematical meanings