Undergraduate Seminar: "The Role of Mathematical Meanings for Teaching and Decentering Actions in Productive Student-Teacher Interactions"

Abstract: Teachers’ mathematical meanings impact their instructional practices and constitute their images of the mathematics they teach and intend students to learn (Thompson, 2013). While numerous studies have focused on K-12 teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT) and mathematical meanings for teaching (MMT) (Thompson, 2013), few studies have examined university-level instructors’ mathematical meanings (e.g., Musgrave & Carlson, 2016). In this report, we explain what we mean by mathematical meanings for teaching and productive student-teacher interactions and use video data to characterize the relationship between teachers’ MMT and decentering actions when teaching. Our results illustrate how a teacher’s MMT can influence the teacher’s ability to make sense of and use student thinking during an interaction in which the teacher is attempting to decenter. Conversely, we illustrate how decentering actions can lead to advances in a teacher’s MMT. 

Host: Adeli Hutton