The depth and breadth of a mathematics teacher's understanding of
mathematics matter most as the teacher engages in the daily work of
teaching. One of the major challenges to teachers is to be ready to draw
on the relevant mathematical ideas from different areas of the school
curriculum and from their post-secondary mathematics experiences that
can be helpful in explaining ideas to students, making instructional
decisions, creating examples, and engaging in other aspects of their
daily work. Being mathematically ready and confident requires teachers
to engage in ongoing professional learning that helps them to connect
mathematics to events like those they live on a daily basis. The purpose
of this volume is to provide teachers, teacher educators, and other
facilitators of professional learning opportunities with examples of
authentic events and tools for discussing those events in professional
learning settings.
The work shared in Facilitator's Guidebook for Use of Mathematics
Situations in Professional Learning resulted from a collaborative
effort of school mathematics supervisors and university mathematics
educators. The collaborators joined their varied experiences as
teachers, coaches, supervisors, teacher educators, and researchers to
suggest ways to scaffold activities, encourage discussion, and instigate
reflection with teacher-participants of differing mathematics
backgrounds and with varying teaching assignments. Each guide has ideas
for engaging and furthering mathematical thought across a range of
facilitator and participant mathematics backgrounds and draw on the
collaborators' uses of the Situations with in-service and prospective
teachers.
The events and mathematical ideas connected to each event come from
Situations in Mathematical Understanding for Secondary Teaching: A
Framework and Classroom-Based Situations. A Situation is a description
of a classroom-related event and the mathematics related to it. For each
of six Situations, school and university collaborators developed a
facilitator's guide that presents ideas and options for engaging
teachers with the event and the mathematical ideas. The volume also
contains suggestions for how teachers and others might develop new
Situations based on events from their own classrooms as a form of
professional learning. Both teacher educators and school-based
facilitators can use this volume to structure sessions and inspire ideas
for professional learning activities that are rooted in the daily work
of mathematics teachers and students.
