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Using Community Artifacts to Support Novice Math Teacher Educators in Teaching Prospective Teachers

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Abstract

Despite the centrality of math teacher educators (MTEs) in teacher education, we know little about the nature of professional learning opportunities for MTEs to develop and enhance the knowledge needed to teach prospective teachers. Existing models for supporting MTEs in developing their knowledge and practice do not address how to prepare novice MTEs in initially learning to teach prospective teachers. We present a professional learning model we have been pursuing for supporting novice MTEs and the generation of and role for community artifacts, namely lesson plans, in that model. We outline the process by which we implement, analyze, and collectively revise lesson plans so that they are continually improved over time to serve as artifacts that better instantiate what members of the local community are learning about how to support novice MTEs through identification of their problems of practice. Finally, we problematize the model we are investigating and propose implications of this model and questions raised by our work with the goal of inviting further discussion about supporting novice MTEs.

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Notes

  1. Pseudonyms are used to protect the identities of all MTEs and PTs.

  2. This task comes from materials developed by a different community of MTEs of which the first author was a member prior to joining the local community in the current study.

  3. Note that we provide a more complete excerpt of the revised lesson plan instructions for the Candy Box Problem in the results section of this paper.

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Correspondence to Alison Castro Superfine.

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Superfine, A.C., Pitvorec, K. Using Community Artifacts to Support Novice Math Teacher Educators in Teaching Prospective Teachers. Int J of Sci and Math Educ 19 (Suppl 1), 59–75 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10763-021-10152-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10763-021-10152-7

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