Professional competence in teaching of mathematics in selected high schools of India and United States: Interplay of cognition, conceptions, and context

The widespread concern about mathematics achievement in the United States has drawn considerable research attention to the question of teacher quality, instructional practice, and cross-cultural research in mathematics education. Schools and their outcomes are increasingly quantified, measured, and compared on a global scale. This study investigated classroom practices of mathematics teachers recommended as competent by their principals in two selected high-achieving high schools of India and the United States. A socioconstructivist-interpretivist framework in conjunction with grounded theory methodology was used to analyze teaching with a view of developing models of professional competence that characterize mathematics teaching in these two cultural contexts. The data collection procedures yielded a data corpus that consisted of transcripts from pre and post-observation interviews, video recordings of a sequence of at least three lessons for each teacher, field notes, and classroom artifacts. Even though a comparison of mathematics teaching in the two settings revealed certain global strategies, conceptions, and patterns of effective mathematics teaching, a noticeable feature of the mathematics teaching in the Indian setting was an emphasis on imparting conceptual understanding and the use of precise mathematical language during classroom discourse. This emphasis was observed to a lesser extent in the United States.;A detailed study of teacher cases from both the research settings yielded a rich conceptualization of the relation between teachers' professional knowledge base and professional competence in teaching of mathematics. The conceptualization of professional competence in teaching of mathematics that emerged from this study as interplay among teacher's cognition, conceptions, and the context suggests that rather than being a static feature, professional competence is a dynamic one manifesting itself in a variety of behaviors even in the same teacher. While the findings are in accord with the existing literature, the substantive theory provides new insight in that it underscores the importance of looking at professional competence as both the possession of various components of teacher's professional knowledge base and the process of activating those components in actual teaching situations. The study has implications for teachers, educators, administrators, and researchers.