Teacher learning within the context of reform: A study of the curriculum Mathematics in Context

The current standards-based reform movement in mathematics asks teachers to make changes in curriculum, content knowledge, pedagogy, and beliefs in order to produce students who have superior mathematical logic, reasoning, and problem solving abilities. Teachers must therefore learn to teach and think about mathematics in a new way. Curriculum developers, in an attempt to support teachers in teaching standards-based mathematics, have written curricula based on the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics standards. Mathematics in Context (MiC) is one such curriculum that school districts have adopted in order to help teachers meet the standards. This study seeks to examine the teacher learning that occurs through implementation of the MiC curriculum.;The researcher employed the qualitative research method Educational Connoisseurship and Criticism in order to create a portrait of teachers who implement this curriculum and the learning that occurred through implementation. Data collection occurred through classroom observation, teacher interviews, and journal keeping.;The major finding of the study is that teachers learn from implementing the MiC curriculum. Teachers learned new pedagogy. They learned how to become facilitators of knowledge; how to create a learning community in which students interact with one another in order to learn mathematics; how to use problem solving as a means to invoke student learning; and how to use context in order to teach mathematics. Teachers further refined their philosophies of how students best learn mathematics. They learned that students should become active participants in their own learning; discovery learning promotes understanding and knowledge development; and the development of conceptual understanding is necessary if students are to be able to apply mathematics knowledge to problem solving situations. The final area of learning occurred in teacher mathematical content knowledge. Teachers developed a deeper conceptual understanding of the mathematics they taught. The significance of these findings is that teachers can learn how to teach standards-based mathematics through implementation of the MiC curriculum. This is significant in that learning to teach standards-based mathematics is a challenge in that it requires teachers to essentially re-learn how to teach mathematics, and this curriculum can support teachers in this endeavor.