RR 90-7 Knowing the subject and learning to teach it: Examining assumptions about becoming a mathematics teacher.
Abstract
This paper compares the mathematical understandings and pedagogical content knowledge of beginning teachers entering teaching through the Los Angeles Unified School District alternate route program with those entering from standard teacher education programs at three universities and colleges. The analysis challenges two common assumptions about becoming a secondary school mathematics teacher, assumptions that underlie the development of alternate routes to certification. The first assumption is that people who major in mathematics without an emphasis on education are both more capable and know more than their mathematics education peers. The second is that professional knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge are best acquired through practical experience as a full-fledged teacher, that university-based teacher education can make few practical or significant contributions to what teachers need to know or be able to do. Yet, despite apparently dramatic structural and philosophical differences between university-based and alternate route programs, much was the same about the novice mathematics teachers across the two groups in this analysis. Neither the teacher education students nor the teacher trainees in our sample were well-prepared to unpack meanings of mathematical ideas on the basis of their mathematical studies. Neither did either group change significantly during their programs. The overall proportions of novice teachers with conceptual understandings of elementary mathematics topics were discouraging. Furthermore, neither the teacher education programs nor the alternate route had any consistently strong impact on novice teachers' ideas about the teacher's role or about desirable practices in teaching mathematics. Many novice teachers in both groups were still unable to represent basic content in meaningful ways at the end of their programs. The supposed advantage of teaching experience in the case of the alternate route teachers did not emerge as a significant factor in our analyses.