Teacher education does matter: A situative view of learning to teach secondary mathematics

The visions of mathematics classrooms called for by current educational ref orm efforts pose great challenges for kindergarten through Grade 12 schools and teacher education programs. Although a number of colleges and universi ties throughout the country are making changes in their teacher education p rograms to reflect these reform recommendations, we have little systematic information on the nature of these programs or their impact on prospective teachers. These issues are of central concern in the study-Learning to Teac h Secondary Mathematics in Two Reform-Based Teacher Education Programs-that we draw on in this article. The article focuses on 1 preservice teacher's (Ms. Savant) knowledge, beliefs, and practices related to proof, tasks, and discourse. A situative perspective on cognition and components of teachers ' professional knowledge frame our research. We examined data on Ms. Savant 's experiences in her teacher education program to understand the influence s of teacher education on her development as a mathematics teacher. This re search indicates that Ms. Savant's teacher education experiences did make a difference in her development as a teacher. Her mathematics methods course provided a large collection of tasks, engaged her and her preservice colle agues in discourse, and provided her with both formal and informal experien ces with proof-all of these experiences reflecting reform-based visions of mathematics classrooms. The situative perspective on cognition directed our attention to issues of compatibility of goals and visions across the vario us university and kindergarten through Grade 12 classroom settings, and it helped us to understand why some aspects of reform-based pedagogy are more easily learned than others: Why some ideas and practices learned as a stude nt in the university setting are more easily transported to the novice teac her's kindergarten through Grade 12 field setting. We conclude that compati bility of these settings on several key dimensions is essential for the set tings to reinforce each other's messages, and thus work in conjunction, rat her than in opposition, to prepare reform-minded teachers.