What are your main research interests?

My main research interests are studying children’s thinking to inform how teachers orchestrate mathematical learning environments for elementary aged children.  I’m also interested in how school leaders foster strong professional communities within schools so that teachers collaborate well and learn collectively.

What are your main contributions to the field?

I have examined the teacher’s role in leading productive classroom discussions in elementary mathematics. I have helped design teacher education and professional development experiences that enable teachers to investigate and learn from their practice together. I have shown how school leaders can create strong professional communities for teacher learning. 

What do you consider to be the major problems that the field needs to solve?

We are still working on the problem of supporting the intellectual and creative aspects of learning to teach so that becoming a good teacher is something that is not just personal and completely up to the individual.  What does it mean to make our practice public and really learn from each other so that students experience the learning of mathematics as joyful, challenging, and personally meaningful and affirming.

My goals for this course are that I hope to learn more about the complexities of learning to become a strong teacher educator.  I am interested in the perspectives of teachers and teacher educators working in school contexts that serve diverse student populations and how we can support students to develop positive identities and capabilities as learners.

What are your main research interests?

My main research interests is creativity, insight, and discovery in mathematics teaching and learning; the role of the affective domain on the teaching and learning of mathematics; the professional growth of mathematics teachers; mathematical problem solving; numeracy; and engaging student thinking.

What are your main contributions to the field?

I think my biggest contribution is my research on Building Thinking Classrooms.  https://ca.corwin.com/en-gb/nam/building-thinking-classrooms-in-mathematics-grades-k-12/book268862

What do you consider to be the major problems that the field needs to solve?

"I see little hope for any further substantial improvements in mathematics education until we turn mathematics education into an experimental science.  ... We need to start with extensive, careful, empirical observations of mathematics learning. Any regularities noted in these observations will lead to the formulation of hypotheses. These hypotheses can then be checked against further observations, and refined and sharpened, and so on. To slight either the empirical observations or the theory building would be folly. They must be intertwined at all times". (E. G. Begle, 1969)

What are your own goals for this course?

To have the students experience a different kind of teaching and the research behind it, and to draw from that insights into their past, present, and future teaching practice. 

What are your main research interests?

The lived experience of thinking mathematically; the nature and role of attention in teaching and learning mathematics; the use of mental imagery in teaching and learning mathematics; researching one’s own practice using the discipline of noticing. 40 years developing distance courses in mathematics and mathematics education at the Open University.

What are your main contributions to the field?

Thinking Mathematically (1982/2010);
40 years at the Open University supporting teachers, particularly those wishing to foster and sustain mathematical thinking in their students; Discipline of Noticing; Structure of Attention; psycho-social coordinations of adherences of aspects of the psyche which form responses to situations; use and abuse of word problems; The use and development of pedagogical actions.

What do you consider to be the major problems that the field needs to solve?

Establishing a universal ethos which acknowledges that:

1. Each individual teacher is engaged in a career-long process of personal development;
2. Teaching takes place IN time while learning takes place OVER time;
3. Teaching mathematics is a caring profession involving both care for mathematics and care for learners. To make significant progress, research needs to stop trying to solve perceived ‘problems', and apply itself to cooperative and collaborative processes of development with learners.

What are your own goals for this course?

To be pressed to re enter yet again a state of enquiry into how people can most effectively be encouraged to participate in the use of, and to experience the joy of using, their own natural powers to be able to choose to think mathematically about problematic situations encountered in their lives.

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