J Math Teacher Educ (2012) 15:263–270

DOI 10.1007/s10857-012-9223-2

Challenges in mathematics teacher education

Olive Chapman

Published online: 27 July 2012

Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Mathematics teacher education is highlighted by its complexities and challenges, partic-

ularly when the goal is to prepare prospective teachers and to help practicing teachers to
teach in ways that they did not experience as learners of mathematics. Thus, while the four
articles in this issue of the Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education (JMTE) offer
different views/aspects of mathematics teacher education, it is the implied challenges that
caught my attention as a common theme. Each article prompted me to think of a different
challenge that I briefly address.

Implementing a new curriculum

Implementing reform-oriented mathematics curricula has been the focus (directly or

indirectly) of many studies on mathematics teachers. A significant influence on this is the
perspective that teachers are central to how the curriculum gets interpreted and lived in the
classroom. Within this perspective lie the challenges for teacher education. For example:
What knowledge should teachers hold to teach a reform-oriented curriculum? What
approaches will effectively facilitate development of this knowledge and application of it
in the classroom? What is the nature of the teachers’ thinking (e.g., beliefs, attitude) or
identity in relation to the curriculum and the relationship to their learning and teaching?
While all of these factors are important and require ongoing attention, I focus on teachers’
beliefs and attitudes to offer an example of them based on a study with which I was
involved.
Mathematics teachers’ beliefs and attitudes toward a new curriculum are likely to be
directly related to their beliefs and attitudes toward their learning and teaching of it. For
example, if the teachers’ beliefs are not in harmony with those framing the curriculum, this
can affect the level of their participation and success in activities to help them to under-
stand and implement the curriculum as intended. In general, teachers’ beliefs and attitudes
can play either a facilitating or an inhibiting role in their learning of the new curriculum.
O. Chapman (&)
University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada
e-mail: [email protected]

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For example, if the teachers hold beliefs compatible with the new curriculum, learning and
implementing it are more likely to occur regardless of the approach to help them to
accomplish this. However, if they hold conflicting beliefs or perceive barriers in imple-
menting and enacting the curriculum, helping them to learn it will likely pose greater
challenges for both them and the teacher educators and make application of it difficult.
Similarly, if they have positive attitudes about the curriculum, they are likely to display
positive attitude to learn and implement it, while negative attitudes will likely make it more
difficult to engage them in learning and implementing it. In general, then, teachers’
compatible beliefs and positive attitudes for the new curriculum could facilitate more
positive engagement in learning it. This suggests that questions such as the following are
important to address in teacher education: What is the nature of teachers’ beliefs and
attitudes in relation to implementing a new mathematics curriculum and the implications
for professional development? What affects the teachers’ attitudes when faced with a new
curriculum in mathematics education? What are the teachers’ attitudes toward the cur-
riculum, in general, and in relation to specific groups of students, in particular?
Based on a study to investigate mathematics teachers’ beliefs and attitudes in imple-
menting a new project-based high school (grades 10–12) mathematics curriculum (Chapman
and Wood 2004), I briefly highlight the nature of these beliefs. This curriculum emphasizes
‘‘the application and relevance of mathematics in daily life.’’ It is intended for students who
are not likely to attend university or pursue an academic area at university that requires
mathematics. The textbooks produced for it consist predominantly of projects.
The participants were experienced teachers at the beginning of the second year of
implementation of the curriculum. Three of the themes emerging from the data involved
their common beliefs about the nature of the projects, small-group learning, and support for
implementation. The teachers’ beliefs about the nature of the projects focused on the utility
of mathematics and relevance to students. They viewed mathematics as meaningful to
these students only when it is related to applications that were relevant to them. Thus, they
believed that the curriculum content was more relevant and meaningful to students because
of the focus on real-world situations. This supported their positive attitude to implementing
the curriculum. However, their beliefs allowed them to place more emphasis on using the
projects to motivate students but limited the mathematical scope and depth in which they
implemented the curriculum.
The teachers believed that teaching and learning through projects was the way to teach
mathematics and would result in a more interesting way of learning for the students, but
they did not use this approach in their prior teaching, in particular, the use of investigations
and groups. The projects were set up as small-group investigations, which challenged the
teachers’ beliefs about using groups in the mathematics classroom. They considered groups
as unnecessary in learning mathematics. Thus, the focus on group work was not considered
an asset. For example, one teacher explained, ‘‘I don’t see the point of why we have to
work in groups. The projects could have been fine to do individually.’’ Another teacher
thought that this was changing a unique part of mathematics instruction.
Mathematics classrooms had something that was a little different. In science they
group up, in English they group up, in social [studies] they group up, so we
[mathematics] did not group up, so I do not mind the grouping up, but it had strong
points to not group up.
Thus, their implementation of groups was very controlled. In spite of this, they rec-
ognized the importance for students’ autonomy. For example:

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Anytime you can give the student the opportunity to learn first, the better it is for the
student. I think that the kind of an inverse relationship, the less the teacher does, the
better the teaching is. That is what this new curriculum is saying; it’s great!
Finally, the teachers believed that the best form of support for their implementation of
the curriculum was from within their schools. While they valued the workshops they
attended in their school system, they considered the internal support to be more important.
They also believed that getting time to read the text book, to plan the lessons, and to ask
questions was more important ‘‘to figure it out’’ than the workshops by the school system.
They were unaware of how this limited the implementation to what they could understand
by themselves, which may not represent the curriculum itself.
This study provides evidence of how teachers’ beliefs can influence if and how a new
curriculum gets implemented and an example of what teachers could believe is important
to aid the implementation process. It reminds us of the importance to attend to beliefs in
mathematics teacher education, in particular, dealing with the challenge of surfacing tacit
beliefs and the complex relationship between beliefs and actions in the implementation of a
new curriculum.

Making connections to real-world contexts

Mathematics education documents in the form of a curriculum or standards are now

explicitly emphasizing connections as one of the important processes in learning and doing
mathematics. For example, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (2008)
standard for the process of connections states that instructional programs should enable
students to ‘‘Recognize and apply mathematics in contexts outside of mathematics’’
(p. 64). This includes making connections to the ‘‘real world,’’ that is, the out-of-classroom
world. Teachers, then, are now expected to provide real-world situations and contexts for
students to make sense of mathematical ideas and to provide opportunities for them to
recognize and celebrate the mathematical connections to their lives. This means that
teachers themselves need to be able to recognize and understand such connections, which
will likely require that they consider mathematics and their teaching in a new way. As
Nicol (2002) found, prospective teachers were not able to unpack the mathematics and the
mathematical demands of work in various contexts and when they did focus on the
mathematics used in a context, they recontexualized it or decontextualized it in ways that
lost the authenticity of the context and the richness of the mathematics.
The challenge for teacher education includes addressing questions such as: What do
teachers recognize as mathematics in real-world situations? How do they (or are they able
to) make connections between classroom practices and real-world uses of mathematics?
What kinds of real-world connections make the most sense for teachers to learn about and
use in their teaching? What approach will help teachers to learn to work with real-world
contexts in a way that does not trivialize or dismiss the important mathematics embodied in
them? In relation to this last question, I have reviewed manuscripts to JMTE that reported
on studies, aimed at using tasks with real-world contexts to facilitate prospective teachers’
learning, in which the mathematics got lost or was trivialized while the context was
emphasized or vice versa. These manuscripts indicated how teacher educators/researchers
could treat this situation in a non-problematic way that overlooks the challenge in
addressing both the mathematics and the real-world aspects of the task with meaningful
depth. They also suggested that engaging the teachers in real-world contextual

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mathematical tasks by itself does not deal with this challenge and more appropriate
approaches must be employed.

Sustainable change or learning process

Many studies in JMTE report on teacher education or professional development programs

that are successful in helping teachers to change during the programs but sustainability of
the change and learning process is often not clear or addressed. Such sustainability is
important to produce large-scale shifts toward reform-oriented mathematics pedagogy.
Professional development programs, then, should aim not only at creating change during
the programs but more importantly to help teachers to be able to sustain it. However, here
is where the challenge for teacher education presents itself, that is, how to work with
teachers to develop sustainable change and learning toward ongoing improvement in their
teaching of mathematics.
Traditional, show-and-tell approaches to mathematics teacher professional develop-
ment, instead of sustaining change, lead to a dependency culture in which the teachers
expect that future teaching ideas or strategies, following the initial learning opportunity,
should be given to them in a ready-made form for implementation in the classroom.
In contrast, recent focus on programs involving practice-based professional learning
communities in which teachers are actively engaged in their own learning seems to be
more promising to accomplish some level of sustainability and ongoing learning. These
programs need to recognize and emerge from the teachers’ thinking and experiences and
provide them with extended opportunities to construct useful knowledge and ways of
transforming their teaching for themselves.
In spite of such teacher-oriented programs, sustainability can be a challenge for teachers
because of various factors that restrict ongoing change and learning after the initial
learning experience. Teachers face challenging circumstances once on their own that could
negatively impact sustainability of ongoing change and learning, in particular, when the
change and learning involve different ways of being and knowing from those with which
they are more comfortable based on past experiences. These challenges could result from
external and/or internal factors. For example, if all of the mathematics teachers in a school
are not on the same path of change, this could negatively impact ongoing change for the
individuals trying to do so. In addition, if the change is not happening at all grade levels in
the school, teachers who are trying to change to reform-oriented instructional strategies
will encounter challenges from students who are more comfortable with their previous
teacher-directed classrooms. An example of internal factors that could negatively impact
sustainability is the teachers’ tacit beliefs that may need to change but are difficult to
access during the professional development, which then can restrict the teachers’ ways of
thinking and actions in the classroom. Sustainability is thus a complex endeavor that
requires ongoing attention in the mathematics teacher education research community.

Implementing technology

In addressing the role of technology in the teaching and learning of mathematics, the
NCTM (2008) states: ‘‘Technology is an essential tool for learning mathematics in the
twenty-first century, and all schools must ensure that all their students have access to
technology’’ (‘‘Implementing a new curriculum’’). However, having access is only one of

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the necessary ingredients to support integration of technology in the mathematics class-

room. Implementation of such recommendations is dependent on the teacher and the
knowledge they hold or ought to hold to use technology to enhance mathematical
understanding for themselves and their students. Given that teachers educated in traditional
mathematics classrooms have not learned mathematics with these technologies, they are
likely to have limited knowledge of both the technologies for use in mathematics and how
to use them. So the challenge for teacher education is to identify what knowledge is needed
and how to prepare prospective and practicing mathematics teachers to use technology in a
way that leads to the development of technological pedagogical content knowledge
(TPCK) for teaching mathematics.
In order to meet this challenge, questions such as the following should be addressed:
What do teachers need to know and be able to do and how do they need to develop this
knowledge for teaching mathematics with technology? What are the appropriate conditions
or frameworks for the development of TPCK for prospective and practicing teachers? In
addition, similar challenges as with the implementation of a new curriculum apply here in
terms of the teachers’ attitudes and beliefs about teaching mathematics with technology.
There is also the issue of technology anxiety. For example, how do these affective factors
support and/or restrict or create barriers to the teachers’ learning and use of technology?
How are they exposed in order to address them? Understanding such questions could lead
to meaningful ways of addressing some of the challenges to help teachers to acquire the
knowledge and experiences needed to incorporate technology in their teaching of
mathematics.

Articles in this issue of JMTE

As previously noted, although not an explicit goal of each, the four articles in this issue of
JMTE collectively make a contribution to our understanding of aspects of the above four
challenges. For example, Edd Taylor addresses connections to students’ out-of-school
experiences and provides insights of challenges with teachers’ learning and a possible way
of addressing them. Laura Van Zoest, Shari Stockero, and Cynthia Taylor’s article pro-
vides insights regarding sustainability of learning through the use of sociomathematical
and professional norms. João Pedro de Ponte addresses a professional development
approach to the implementation of a new mathematics curriculum. Mustafa Dogan deals
with prospective teachers views of technology in their learning and teaching. Some
highlights of each article are provided next.
Edd Taylor’s research report describes a year-long professional development program
designed to support teachers’ use of students’ everyday practices to improve classroom
mathematics. The participants were 14 female elementary school teachers. The profes-
sional development required them to discover the mathematics in which their students were
engaged outside of school, match those practices to classroom mathematics, design lessons
that made use of the connections they identified, and evaluate the success of the lessons
they created. The outcome of this approach was that while teachers found creative ways to
use the context that children engaged in outside of school, many had greater difficulty
thinking about the mathematics that the children used in that context. In order to address
this resulting challenge of how to better support thinking about the mathematics contained
in out-of-school practices in ways that would result in greater success in building on
students’ informal knowledge, he developed two activity probes to help the teachers think
about the type of mathematics children used in their everyday practices and the

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mathematics they included in their lessons. With this guidance, the ways that teachers’
lessons drew on their students’ knowledge acquired through their involvement in activities
outside of school improved. While early lessons seemed to focus only on context, in the
post-probes lessons, the teachers began to look more deeply at how the mathematics in
the out-of-school activity was similar to the mathematics in the school context. Thus, the
focused probes were helpful in highlighting the importance of context paired with
the mathematics contained in that particular context in subsequent lessons.
The study also included an analysis of the possible influence of the professional
development facilitators and the assigned readings on developing a focus on a particular
approach to designing lessons that draws on informal mathematical knowledge. Thus, the
overarching outcome of the study was the creation of The Multi-Approach Engagement
Framework, which describes ways particular types of activities are similar to the types of
children out-of-school activities and how the mathematics within these activities are
embedded within practice. Taylor describes his work as an early step into understanding
the benefits and challenges of utilizing everyday mathematical knowledge for the specific
purpose of supporting classroom mathematics. He suggests that further research may need
to examine links between particular approaches to linking in- and out-of-school learning
and particular goals of the professional development.
Laura Van Zoest, Shari Stockero, and Cynthia Taylor’s research report describes a study
that investigated the extent to which three sociomathematical and four professional norms
intentionally fostered in an early mathematics pedagogy course re-emerged in a similar
context. The participants were 11 prospective secondary school mathematics teachers in
the final mathematics pedagogy course of the same teacher education program and 16 self-
selected beginning secondary school mathematics teachers who were graduates of the same
program with fewer than 4 years of teaching experience. The authors viewed the seven
norms as supporting teachers to improve their own mathematical understanding, learn to
view and analyze classroom practice in productive ways, think about developing norms in
mathematics classrooms with students, and develop professional dispositions that support
continued learning from practice. As part of the study, the two groups of participants
engaged in parallel activities that were similar to those they had participated in during the
initial pedagogy course, using video materials. Both groups used the same mathematics
problem, analyzed the same video, and completed the same written work. In particular, the
participants focused on analyzing student thinking and considering the implications of the
teacher’s actions for supporting student thinking in ways that are not commonly seen in
teacher professional development.
The researchers examined the data to determine whether the seven target behaviors
were normative for the prospective and beginning teachers. All seven norms were found to
be durable over time, with the sociomathematical norm of providing a mathematical
argument being the most widely and consistently exhibited among the participants. Five of
the norms were consistently durable over time with both groups of participants, and their
engagement with two of the norms was positively affected by additional classroom
experience. The results point to the long-term benefits of developing productive norms
early in a teacher education program. The authors conclude that this study supports the idea
that intentionally developing productive sociomathematical and professional norms early
in a teacher education program has the potential to contribute to teachers’ continued
learning from practice, supporting them in ways that could lead to self-sustaining gener-
ative change. Thus, this study provides evidence that an investment in developing pro-
ductive norms at one level can support future learning at another level.

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João Pedro de Ponte’s article, in the mathematics teacher education around the world
category, provides insights about a national professional development program (the
‘‘extended workshop’’) that was used in the preparatory stages of the introduction of a new
mathematics curriculum in Portugal. This curriculum indicates two main purposes for
mathematics education: to promote mathematics learning and the ability to use mathe-
matics in different contexts and to promote positive attitudes and appreciation of mathe-
matics. It also favors an exploratory approach and emphasizes three mathematical
processes (i.e., problem solving, mathematical reasoning and mathematical communica-
tion) that must be continuously addressed while working on the content themes.
The extended workshop was based on five major ideas—orientation toward teachers’
professional practice, focus on students’ learning, collaboration, teachers researching their
own practice, and change of teachers’ professional culture. Evaluation of the workshops
indicated that some of the teachers who already had a high alignment with the new
orientation of the curriculum showed a clear support for it, some showed interest in
learning about it, and others showed reservations. Teachers who were less attuned to the
new curriculum orientations had more difficulty in making sense of the rationale behind the
exploratory tasks. But many others showed a high interest in trying out the new curriculum
perspectives in their classrooms. The emphasis on practice, the work with materials
directly related to the classroom activity and the collaborative setting were well accepted
by most participants. But the research aspect was considered to be challenging and resulted
in some concern for many. The most complex phase of the workshops was the final
discussion that was a new experience for many of the teachers.
Mustafa Dogan also contributes an article to the mathematics education around the
world category. He explored prospective Turkish primary mathematics teachers’ views
about the use of computers in mathematics education. The adjusted sample comprised of
129 fourth year prospective primary mathematics teachers from two different universities
in Turkey. The specific aim of the study was to investigate their experience with computers
up to the end of their teacher education program in order to understand the situation in
Turkey from their perspective. Data consisting of participants’ written responses to a
survey question were qualitatively analyzed and categorized according to the Techno-
logical Pedagogical Content Knowledge framework.
Results showed that the participants’ comments typically emphasized the importance of
using computers to improve understanding of different mathematics topics. However, a
reasonably large number of respondents expressed negative feelings about computers and
computer-based mathematics education. They also indicated that they were neither con-
fident nor sure about their technical skills and personal abilities for using computers in
class to teach mathematics. They enjoyed working with computers even though they were
only able to perform relatively minor calculations with them. They stated that improved
use of the computer could help them to learn how to use it to teach mathematics more
effectively. Dogan concluded that providing more purposeful activities may increase
Turkish prospective mathematics teachers’ views, performance and confidence about
technology usage in mathematics education.
To conclude, these four articles provide a broader lens to view mathematics teacher
education in international contexts than that of challenges. However, in highlighting some
of the important challenges that contribute to the complexity of mathematics teacher
education, it is hoped that they encourage further research of them to deepen our under-
standing of how to deal with them effectively.

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References

Chapman, O., & Wood, L. (2004). Teachers’ beliefs influencing the implementing of a project-based high
school mathematics curriculum. In D. McDougall & A. Ross (Eds.) Proceedings of the twenty-sixth
annual meeting of the North American chapter of the psychology of mathematics education vol. 2.
Toronto, ON: University of Toronto, p. 954.
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (2008, March). The role of technology in the teaching and
learning of mathematics. Retrieved May 31, 2012, from http://www.nctm.org/about/content.aspx?
id=14233.
Nicol, C. (2002). Where’s the math? Prospective teachers visit the workplace. Educational Studies in
Mathematics, 50(3), 289–309.

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