Middle

This article presents our plans and initial work to explore how mathematics teacher education programs can prepare teachers for diverse middle grades classrooms. It describes the start-up of a five-year National Science Foundation project to design, develop, and test technology-enriched teacher preparation strategies to address equity in algebra learning. The participants in this pilot group demonstrated a need to develop their mathematical problem-solving skills, but they also exhibited strong beliefs about their own potential to be successful in the mathematics classroom. Preliminary results appear to indicate that Second Life (software) simulations can provide rich settings for teacher development on specific mathematics teaching skills and challenge them to apply their ideas about diversity. (Contains 5 tables and 4 figures.)

Despite evidence that it can help students learn higher-order thinking skills and gain deep content knowledge, problem-based learning (PBL) is not deployed on a large scale in K-12 classrooms. This conceptual chapter explores teacher’s past experiences, and resulting habitus, to explain the minimal extent of PBL in K-12 schools. Central to teachers’ abilities to implement PBL is their ability to provide scaffolding, and their habitus may interfere with this process. Implications for teacher education and teacher change are discussed.