Teachers' Professional Development and the Elementary Mathematics Classroom (Studies in Mathematical Thinking and Learning Series) - Softcover

Cohen, Sophia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805842888 ISBN 13: 9780805842883

Publisher: Routledge, 2004

Synopsis

This book illustrates the experiences of elementary school teachers across one year's time as they participated in a teacher development seminar focused on mathematics, and as a result changed their beliefs, their knowledge, and their practices. It explores these experiences as a means of understanding the learning that takes a teacher from a more traditional teaching practice to one that is focused on the ideas and understandings that students and teachers have of the subject matter.

The work emerges from and reports on a unique data set from a two-year study of teacher learning that was funded by the Spencer and MacArthur foundations. The teachers, whose work is at the center of this study, were participants in the Developing Mathematical Ideas seminar (DMI), a mathematics teacher development seminar for elementary school teachers. This seminar is one example of intensive, domain-specific professional development. In this seminar teachers study elementary mathematics content to deepen their own understanding of it, they study the development among children of the ideas central to elementary mathematics, and they experience a teaching and learning environment consistent with the pedagogy envisioned by the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics' Principles and Standards for School Mathematics. The seminar is a nationally available teacher development curriculum, thus interested educators can gain access to the resources necessary to offer similar seminars in their own communities.

Teachers' Professional Development and the Elementary Mathematics Classroom: Bringing Understandings to Light will be widely interesting to a broad audience, including mathematics teacher educators, teacher education researchers, policymakers, and classroom teachers. It will serve well as a text in a range of graduate courses dealing with teacher cognition/knowledge for teaching, mathematics methods, psychology of learning, and pedagogical theory.

About this title

Review

Cohen's book is a valuable inside look at a complex professional practice as it evolves over time within the group and within the experiences and classrooms of individual teachers.
—Teaching Education

Reading the book will motivate teachers to avail themselves of all professional development oportunities.
—Teaching Children Mathematics

...A very timely and ground-breaking book about the complexities of bringing about systemic reform in large urban school districts in the area of literacy education.
—Kouider Mokhtari
Oklahoma State University

teaching provide vivid images of classrooms in which students learn to explore mathematics more deeply, express their mathematical thinking, and listen respectfully and carefully to their classmates' ideas. Cross-case analyses identify features of the professional development experience that foster teacher and student change. The book's balanced presentation of rich description and thoughtful analysis offers important insights for teachers, teacher educators, and policymakers who seek to improve mathematics teaching and learning.
—Hilda Borko
University of Colorado

This book has important messages for all those involved in supporting teacher learning. While painting a vivid and compelling picture of teachers on a journey to discovery and learning, the author provides important insights into the intentional design of the program in which these teachers participated. She helps the reader reflect on the framework that guided the work--one that places mathematics and...children's mathematics at its core. The ideas of teachers seeing themselves and their students as doers of mathematics, deepening their understandings of the mathematics they teach, and building practices that support children learning mathematics, have important implications for professional learning across the grades. What a wonderful and inspiring account of professional development!
—Judith Mumme
WestEd

Having carefully documented the story of a professional development seminar, Sophia Cohen digs into her data to present an insightful and compelling account of teachers committed to learning mathematics and improving their practice. This is necessary reading for anyone involved in elementary- and middle-school teachers' professional development as mathematics teachers.
—Deborah Schifter
Education Development Center

The detailed stories of teachers' learning are wonderfully engaging--they are easy to follow, and yet they show the depth of thinking that was required for these teachers to explore mathematics and their students' mathematics in new ways. The book offers important lessons for those involved in professional development and in the study of teacher change.
—Miriam Gamoran Sherin
Northwestern University

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0805842888
• ISBN 13: 9780805842883
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 208