Focus on analysis
What distinguishes our approach to the preparation of mathematics teachers from that of the
teacher educators cited above is perhaps a stronger emphasis on analysis, echoed in the
project name: Learning to Learn from Mathematics Teaching (LLMT). In this project, we
build on previous work on lesson analysis (Santagata et al. 2007) and on the idea of treating
lessons like experiments (Hiebert et al. 2003). We posit that teachers continuously grow in
their professional knowledge when their work in the classroom is paired with systematic
analysis of practice. This analysis is much more structured than mere reflection. It involves a
process centered on student thinking and learning and guided by clearly defined learning
goals. We also suggest that teachers cannot learn to reason productively about their teaching
from experience only. This learning process must begin during teacher preparation, and the
knowledge and skills necessary to conduct systematic analysis of practice must be developed
through a purposeful curriculum. In the LLMT project, a central component of this curriculum
is the lesson analysis framework. This framework includes the following questions: (1)
What is the main learning goal of this lesson (or lesson segment)? (2) Are the students making
progress toward the learning goal? What evidence do you have that students are making
progress? What evidence is missing? (3) Which specific activities and instructional strategies
assisted students in making progress toward the learning goal? Why? How do you know?
Which did not assist students? Why? How do you know? (4) What alternative strategies do
you think the teacher could use? And how would those strategies better assist students to make
progress toward the learning goal?
By using this framework to analyze various artifacts of practice, PSTs learn to integrate
teaching elements (i.e., the teacher, the students, and the content) and to reason about the
effects of teaching on student learning (Santagata et al. 2007; Santagata and Angelici
2010). Specifically, the course emphasizes questions 2 and 3 of the lesson analysis
framework. Various course activities were designed to teach PSTs to attend carefully to
student thinking and learning of specific mathematical ideas and identify evidence of
student progress toward specific mathematical goals. Once evidence of progress or diffi-
culties is identified, PSTs are asked to reason about strategies the teacher used that might
have assisted students in learning or might not have been very successful.
Within this view of teacher learning, teacher preparation should provide both knowledge of
core practices and tools for continuing to improve one’s teaching over time through systematic