Teacher education seeks to transform prospective and/or practicing
teachers from neophyte possibly uncritical perspectives on teaching and
learning to more knowledgeable, adaptable, analytic, insightful,
observant, resourceful, reflective and confident professionals ready to
address whatever challenges teaching secondary mathematics presents.
This transformation occurs optimally through constructive engagement in
tasks that foster knowledge for teaching secondary mathematics. Ideally
such tasks provide a bridge between theory and practice, and challenge,
surprise, disturb, confront, extend, or provoke examination of
alternatives, drawn from the context of teaching. We define tasks as the
problems or activities that, having been developed, evaluated and
refined over time, are posed to teacher education participants. Such
participants are expected to engage in these tasks collaboratively,
energetically, and intellectually with an open mind and an orientation
to future practice. The tasks might be similar to those used by
classroom teachers (e.g., the analysis of a graphing problem) or
idiosyncratic to teacher education (e.g., critique of videotaped
practice).
This edited volume includes chapters based around unifying themes of
tasks used in secondary mathematics teacher education. These themes
reflect goals for mathematics teacher education, and are closely related
to various aspects of knowledge required for teaching secondary
mathematics. They are not based on the conventional content topics of
teacher education (e.g., decimals, grouping practices), but on broad
goals such as adaptability, identifying similarities, productive
disposition, overcoming barriers, micro simulations, choosing tools, and
study of practice. This approach is innovative and appeals both to
prominent authors and to our target audiences.
