Yeo, Joseph B. W.

Mathematics education research has focused on developing teachers’ knowledge or other visible aspects of the teaching practice. This paper contributes to conversations around making a teacher’s thinking visible and enhancing a teacher’s pedagogical reasoning by exploring the use of pedagogical documentation. In this paper, we describe how a teacher’s pedagogical reasoning was made visible and highlight aspects of his thinking in relation to his instructional decisions during a series of lessons on division. Implications for professional learning are discussed.

Despite recent calls to adopt practice-embedded approaches to teacher professional learning, how teachers learn from their practice is not clear. What really matters is not the type of professional learning activities, but how teachers engage with them. In this paper, we position learning from teaching as a dialogic process involving teachers’ pedagogical reasoning and actions. In particular, we present a case of an experienced teacher, Mr. Robert, who was part of a primary school’s mathematics professional learning team (PLT) to describe how he learned to teach differently, and how he taught differently to learn for a series of lessons on division. The findings reiterate the complexity of teacher learning and suggest possible implications for mathematics teacher professional development.

Much of a teacher’s practice and professional learning remains unseen despite recent calls to incorporate practice-based and inquiry-based approaches to improve mathematics instruction. Although the idea of pedagogical reasoning and action can provide a way to unpack these unseen aspects of practice, it remains to be seen how a teacher’s actions and thinking can be made visible. In this paper, we present a case of how a teacher’s pedagogical reasoning is made visible through pedagogical documentation, which suggests the possibility of using documentation to unpack these unseen aspects of a teacher’s practices.

The recent revision of the Singapore secondary mathematics syllabuses emphasises seeing mathematics as a tool and as a discipline. Doing this requires teachers to design and implement inquiry-based learning activities with their students. However, it is not always clear what inquiry-based learning entails and what it means for students to learn mathematics as a discipline. In this paper, we discuss what it means to think like a mathematician and illustrate three forms of inquiry-based teaching approaches with some examples for teachers to consider.

While reports of teachers’ use of curriculum materials are common, that of teachers as designers of their own materials are far less so. We argue that these (rare) instructional materials, defined as materials that are classroom-ready and that carry the teachers’ actual instructional goals, are ‘objects’ that are suitable as records of teachers’ planning and learning when developed alongside professional development. We provide supporting evidence of this claim and unpack the complexities of interacting instructional goals through a case study of a teacher who (re-)designed her own instructional materials as she participated in professional development. From the findings of the case, we reflect on the educational and methodological implications of pursing this research approach.