By Erin Moss, Co-editor of DUE Point

What support exists for college faculty who are new to the unique challenges of teaching mathematics courses for future K-8 teachers? The NSF-sponsored Professional Resources & Inquiry in Mathematics Education (PRIMED) offers an online short-course in which instructor-participants work in pairs to explore and experiment with activity-based approaches to teaching. Principal Investigator Dr. Shandy Hauk describes the design of the PRIMED learning modules and preliminary findings of the associated research in the Q&A below.   

What specific problems in K-8 teacher education are you seeking to address?  

The professional cultures of college faculty and prospective K-8 teachers are different in terms of the foregrounding goal: college faculty teach math while K-8 teachers teach children. Many instructors new to teaching future teachers apply the instructional method they know best: lecture and problem-solving demonstration with some call-and-response to check that students are following along.  Little is available for faculty who want to improve their skills with this population of college learners. 

An overarching goal of the PRIMED project is to humanize mathematics teaching. That is, we aim to shift the focus from an industrial model of teaching as the production of a particular kind of widget (i.e., a student who can rapidly summon stored knowledge from a mental database) to teaching as that which facilitates learning and reasoning about mathematics for students with varying needs.

What is your process for developing and modifying learning modules for your online short course?    

Just like we want instructors to be responsive to the needs of their future teachers, we must also be responsive to the PRIMED participants’ needs! The existing literature on faculty professional learning documents that faculty generally expect two – sometimes contradictory – things: (1) to teach as they have been taught and (2) to learn by doing. Not surprisingly, the research literature indicates the same tension exists for K-12 teachers. The literature shows us that a way to resolve the tension is to have the courses for future teachers be done in a collaborative and task-based format – that way prospective teachers will be learning in ways they are expected to teach. 

We have adopted the same idea for college instructor development. Thus, PRIMED faculty engage in five task-based learning modules with a partner (each of which requires about 3 hours of effort, for a total of 15 hours across the semester). The tasks include watching and purposefully reflecting on videos of math teaching and learning in both college classrooms of prospective teachers and classrooms of children. In addition to video-based tasks and discussing pieces from mathematics education literature, participants design and conduct small teaching experiments in their own instruction. 

The design team has been careful in the modules to draw attention to the diversity of experience among students who seek to become K-8 teachers and the associated variation in learner needs. Similarly, designers have gathered comprehensive feedback from pilot participants so that short-course tasks are responsive to and productive for instructors. In the design process, critical and constructive feedback continues to be crucial for success. 

What challenges do professors of preservice teachers face when implementing task-based instruction in their courses?  What support do they perceive as most effective?   

PRIMED faculty participants find it challenging to implement task-based instruction.  It requires interacting with college students in ways they have not done before in a classroom. Rather than being instructor-centered, task-based instruction is student-centered in the sense that the learning happens because students interact around a complex problem. PRIMED instructors are learning to become resident mathematics experts whose job is identifying worthwhile tasks and orchestrating productive small group and whole group interactions. 

Learning how to implement tasks and assess what their future teachers know is a slow process. As with mathematics itself, it requires that faculty have room to fail along the way and try again. Hence, the low-stakes small experiments that participants design and try in their classrooms. While PRIMED short-course participants have reported fascination with, and learning from, videos and readings, they have reported they particularly enjoy having a community in which to discuss their struggles as they engage in the process together. 

Can you share some preliminary findings from your research?  

Though preliminary, one of the most intriguing findings is that instructors' perceptions of (and orientations towards) those who they perceive as different from themselves appear to be modified by PRIMED short-course participation. This suggests the course is in some way addressing the overarching goal of the work to humanize mathematics teaching. The project adds evidence that mathematics faculty want many of the same things from their professional learning that K-12 teachers do. 

Another contribution we anticipate making to the mathematics education literature is about the short-course design itself. We have begun documenting the task-based foundations of the PRIMED design of professional learning for college mathematics faculty. 

Learn more about NSF DUE 1625215  

Full Project Name: Professional Resources & Inquiry in Mathematics Education (PRIMED) for K-8 Teacher Education 

Abstract: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1625215

Project Contact: Dr. Shandy Hauk, PI; hauk@sfsu.edu 

*Responses in this blog were edited for length and clarity.

Erin Moss is a co-editor of DUE Point and an Associate Professor of Mathematics Education at Millersville University, where she works with undergraduates from all majors as well as graduate students in the M.Ed. in Mathematics program.