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Ruben navarrette: good teachers know both content and how to "get it across" to students. Teachers need knowledge of how to teach content, he says, But it's different from that of physicists. He says teachers don't need to know a "rule" for subtracting negative numbers. But they need to know how to show that subtracting a negative is the same as adding a positive.
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curious - and crucial - case of mathematical knowledge for teaching.pdf
Ruben navarrette: good teachers know both content and how to "get it across" to students. Teachers need knowledge of how to teach content, he says, But it's different from that of physicists. He says teachers don't need to know a "rule" for subtracting negative numbers. But they need to know how to show that subtracting a negative is the same as adding a positive.
Ruben navarrette: good teachers know both content and how to "get it across" to students. Teachers need knowledge of how to teach content, he says, But it's different from that of physicists. He says teachers don't need to know a "rule" for subtracting negative numbers. But they need to know how to show that subtracting a negative is the same as adding a positive.
fying this knowledge has proven surprisingly difficult. A common approach is to require teachers to major in the fields they will teach and then add knowledge of how children learn and classroom experience. But some argue that the content knowledge that teachers need is different from that needed by mathemati- cians or physicists. Take the case of something as apparently simple as what knowledge is involved in teach- ing operations with integers. Most adults re- member a rule for subtracting negative numbers subtracting a negative is the same as adding a positive. Is knowing this rule enough to teach this material? Note that this isnt the same as asking what students need to learn. Rather, we ask about the mathematical understanding needed to teach this topic. To focus the question, we drop in on Ms. Gonzlez, a 7th-grade mathematics teacher. She begins her lesson by using black chips to represent positive numbers and red chips for negative numbers. Adding one black and one red chip results in zero. Her students have been solving such problems as +4 + (-8) = x by matching as many black and red chips as possible, then counting the chips left over (in this case, four reds). The model seems to help her students solve addition problems. But the next problem in the text is differ- ent: Ms. Gonzlez begins by modeling -1 (-3) on the overhead projector by combining two red chips and one black, or -2 + (+1), which is -1, and then subtracting three reds: The students struggle with this representa- tion. A student ventures that the answer is -1; another proposes that the answer is 5; and a third argues for an answer of -2. Many more note that matching a black with red leaves four reds, or a result of -4. Ms. Gonzlez checks the answer in the teachers edition; the answer it gives is 2. Unclear how to use the chips to show this, she abandons the model and demonstrates how to solve -1 - (-3) = 2 by showing that the minus sign in front of the 3 and the subtraction sign combine to make ad- dition of a positive. What is the mathematical knowledge needed to teach this material and to interpret and use the text? Knowing the conventional procedure is clearly useful, and Ms. Gonzlez did know it. She is able to easily use it to solve problems involving subtraction of integers. But our analysis of the mathematical demands of teaching this lesson shows that more is in- volved. Modeling Mathematics in Teaching One of the most easily observable teaching tasks is constructing representations that are both mathematically accurate and helpful to learners. In this case, one of these representa- tions involved using chips to solve subtraction problems. As the teacher and student confu- sion shows, this task is far from straightfor- ward. The representation Ms. Gonzlez cre- ated while mathematically correct can- not be easily manipulated to arrive at the solu- The Curious and Crucial Case of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching R&D HEATHER HILL AND DEBORAH LOEWENBERG BALL Teaching mathematics requires specialized knowledge about the subject, which mathematicians dont need. R&D appears in each issue of Kappan with the assistance of the Deans Alliance, which is composed of the deans of the education schools/colleges at the following universities: Harvard University, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Stanford University, Teachers College Columbia University, University of California Berkeley, University of California Los Angeles, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Wisconsin. 68 Kappan October 2009 pdkintl.org HEATHER HILL is an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, Massachu- setts. DEBORAH LOEWENBERG BALL is dean of the University of Michigan School of Education, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and also the William H. Payne Collegiate Pro- fessor of Education there. J I u n l i m i t e d / C o m s t o c k Start with Rule End with Subtract 3 Find the missing part for this chip problem. What would be a number sentence for this problem? tion. A more promising way is to interpret subtraction as taking away (-3) from the ini- tial quantity: However, only two red chips (-2) are pres- ent. How can (-3) be taken away? The solu- tion, as briefly described by the textbook, would be to add another pair of black and red chips: The extra pair of black and red is equal to 0, so the total is still -1, but with this represen- tation, three negative units can be taken away, showing the answer as +2. This representation is similar to what we do in multidigit subtrac- tion when we rename the number (conven- tionally called regrouping or borrowing) to be able to subtract. Had Ms. Gonzlez seen this connection, she might have been better able to support students use of the chip model. The lesson also requires facility with un- derstanding and handling the mathematics that students say and do. As in many of her other lessons, Ms. Gonzlez encourages stu- dents to construct solutions and explain their answers. Many of her students answers reveal that they are confusing addition and subtrac- tion of negative numbers. Recognizing this as a common struggle can help Ms. Gonzlez plan for and even prevent this confusion. We are not criticizing Ms. Gonzlez. In fact, once she saw the difficulty, she focused clearly on the procedure. She also actively in- volved students in the content of the lesson and trying to make sense of the material. She tried creating a more realistic example with money and debt to help her students under- stand, but the story she told did not match the problem and was confusing. How do you rep- resent 1 (-3) using money and debt? It can be done, but it requires some care and involves an understanding of net worth. What are other situations that correspond to the subtraction of negative numbers? Examples like this show the mathematical demands of making mathe- matics comprehensible to students, and make clear that the mathematical knowledge in- volved is more than being able to solve the problems oneself. The simple instinct to make connections to students lives turns out to be more complicated mathematically than it seems. Teachers Mathematical Knowledge What must teachers know and be able to do? Despite years of research and a wide vari- ety of methods for measuring teacher knowl- edge, the answer to this question has been sur- prisingly elusive. Some have used teacher cer- tification as a simple proxy measure for teacher knowledge and quality (Ball and Hill 2008). Only a handful of these studies show that high school teachers certified in mathe- matics produce somewhat higher student gains than those certified in other subjects. Many studies, some at the elementary level and some at other levels, show no effects of teacher certification on student outcomes (National Mathematics Advisory Panel 2008). What about courses taken or degrees at- tained as a measure of teacher knowledge in mathematics? This indicator is closer to what teachers may actually know. Not surprisingly, this indicator is somewhat more consistent in showing effects on students achievement, but only in some studies. Such effects show up only at the secondary school level; these same effects are not present in studies of elementary teachers (National Mathematics Advisory Panel 2008). These studies suggest that, though it would be foolish to say that mathematical knowledge is not important to teaching mathematics, conventional content knowledge seems to be insufficient for skillfully handling the mathe- matical tasks of teaching. Because the evidence from this body of re- search puzzled us, we began to study teaching practice. We sought to identify common tasks of teaching that require mathematical skill and insight. We observed many classrooms. As we made progress in identifying and describing these teaching tasks, we began to appreciate the mathematical demands of ordinary teach- ing. We saw the mathematical understanding involved in posing questions, interpreting stu- dents answers, providing explanations, and using representations. We saw it in teachers talk and in the language they taught students to use. We realized that the capacity to see the content from anothers perspective and to un- derstand what another person is doing entails mathematical reasoning and skill that are not needed for research mathematics or for bench science. pdkintl.org V91 N2 Kappan 69 We realized that the capacity to see the content from anothers perspective and to understand what another person is doing entails mathematical reasoning and skill that are not needed for research mathematics or for bench science. Deborah Ball and Algebra Project creator Bob Moses talk to Kappan editor Joan Richardson about equity and math education. See Pages 54-59 in this issue of Kappan. As we investigated Mathematical Knowl- edge for Teaching (MKT), we also began to notice different domains (Ball, Thames, and Phelps 2008). It was clear that some of the mathematical resources that teaching requires are similar to the mathematical knowledge that other pro- fessionals use. We labeled this common content knowledge; it informs such teaching tasks as knowing whether a students answer is correct, the definition of a concept or object, and how to carry out a procedure. But we also saw that teachers required some specialized mathemati- cal knowledge for example, being able to model integer arithmetic using different rep- resentations. We also noted that some MKT was more of a blend of mathematics with other kinds of knowledge, such as knowledge of stu- dents or knowledge of teaching or curriculum. These blended forms of content knowledge knowledge of content and students or knowledge of content and teaching and knowledge of content and curriculum appeared as finer-grained cate- gories of what Shulman and his colleagues termed pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman 1986; Shulman 1987; Wilson, Shul- man, and Richert 1987). Recently, weve be- gun to see signs of another sort of MKT that we are calling horizon knowledge to de- scribe a kind of mathematical peripheral vi- sion needed in teaching, that is, a view of the larger mathematical landscape that teaching requires (Ball and Bass 2009). We tested our emerging theories by inves- tigating whether these ways of knowing and using mathematics matter. We focused on sev- eral key principles that we hoped would set our questions apart from conventional multiple- choice assessments. First, we wrote items to represent the specialized knowledge that our studies had led us to hypothesize were crucial to teaching, such as being able to: Interpret and analyze student work; Provide a mathematical explanation thats intelligible to young learners; and Forge links between mathematical symbols and pictorial representations. Second, we wrote items to represent the mathematical tasks of teaching that recur across different curriculum materials or ap- proaches to instruction. These included such tasks as: Analyzing student errors; Encountering unconventional solutions; Choosing examples; or Assessing the mathematical integrity of a representation in a textbook. We refer to our items as the Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (MKT) measures, and they have been used by dozens of researchers and professional development projects. Administering these questions to large groups of teachers has helped us and other re- searchers learn more about what kinds of knowledge are related to student outcomes. For instance, a group of economists recently ad- ministered a survey to 418 beginning teachers. This survey included our measures, measures of general cognitive ability, and measures of sev- eral personality traits, including conscientious- ness. Of all these variables, only MKT was a sig- nificant predictor of student outcomes, with an effect size almost double that of the general cognitive ability (Rockoff et al. 2008). We have found similar results in our own work involving over 300 teachers (Hill, Rowan, and Ball 2005). We also have found that teachers MKT is strongly related to the mathematical quality of their instruction, including their use of mathe- matical explanation and representations, re- sponsiveness to students mathematical ideas, and ability to avoid mathematical imprecision and error (Hill et al. 2008). Developing Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching How do teachers develop and use MKT? Strong MKT seems to correlate with certain habits of mind, such as careful attention to mathematical detail and well-explicated rea- soning, as well as agility with a variety of math- ematical productions from textbooks and stu- dents. In other cases, teachers report develop- ing their own knowledge through extensive mathematics-focused professional develop- ment. In one of our own studies, we found that summer professional development sites that R&D 70 Kappan October 2009 pdkintl.org Subject Matter Pedagogical Content Knowledge Knowledge Knowledge of Content and Students Knowledge of Content and Teaching Knowledge of Curriculum Common Content Knowledge Knowledge at the Mathematical Horizon Specialized Content Knowledge Learn more about the Elementary Mathematics Laboratory that Deborah Ball runs each summer in Michigan. The mathematics class for rising 5th graders is collectively planned and studied by a diverse group of professionals, including teachers, researchers, teacher educators, student teachers, and mathematicians. The group meets each day before class, observes the lesson, and then debriefs together. http://sitemaker.umich.edu/ eml2009/home focused teachers work on mathematical rep- resentation, explanation, and communication outperformed similar sites with less focus on those topics (Hill and Ball 2004). Much work remains to be done in this arena. Given this progress in understanding the nature of the mathematical knowledge needed for teaching, several key questions and prob- lems lie ahead. For example, can MKT be bet- ter built into useful instructional guidance? Could Ms. Gonzlez teachers guide have supported her understanding of the key math- ematical ideas involved in subtraction of inte- gers? Could it have offered her other repre- sentations the number line, for example and not only showed exactly how to use them but also compared their merits to the chip model? More generally, can materials be de- signed that better support teachers work? Tools and resources typically support profes- sionals work in other fields, yet in teaching we have left most of the reasoning to the individ- ual teacher, based on the view that teaching is a creative act that depends on context. Given the intricacy of the work as well as the the size of the teaching profession, this has been an in- efficient and ineffective way to support high- quality instruction (Ball and Forzani in press). Ms. Gonzlez does not need to invent how to represent integer arithmetic; this can be more closely supported, leaving her the discretion to make localized judgments about a host of other important teaching issues. Another important question is to identify those aspects of MKT that show the greatest po- tential for improving learning. Is detailed knowledge of place value of particular utility? Are some representations the number line, for example more vital for teachers to have command of than others? Our studies suggest that knowledge of mathematical explanation and representation may be especially important. Also, in order for teachers to have opportu- nities to learn MKT, those who prepare teach- ers and provide professional development will themselves need to have adequate support. Bet- ter materials, more specific guidance focused on the teaching of MKT, and better design of op- portunities to learn from practice are essential. Teaching helping others learn to know and do requires specialized ways of know- ing the domain. As we begin to appreciate the special kind of content knowledge that it takes, along with other kinds of knowledge, skill, and commitments, we will be better able to sup- port teachers to do this important work. And in the end, if skillful teaching is better and more systematically supported, the beneficiar- ies will be young people, who will get the in- struction they deserve. K REFERENCES Ball, Deborah L., and Hyman Bass. With an Eye on the Mathematical Horizon: Knowing Mathematics for Teaching to Learners Mathematical Futures. Paper prepared based on keynote address at the 43rd Jahrestagung fr Didaktik der Mathematik in Oldenburg, Germany, March 14, 2009. Ball, Deborah L., and Francesca M. Forzani. The Work of Teaching and the Challenge for Teacher Education. Journal of Teacher Education (in press). Ball, Deborah L., and Heather C. Hill. Measuring Teacher Quality in Practice. In Measurement Issues and Assessment for Teaching Quality, ed. Drew H. Gitomer, pp. 80-98. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2008. Ball, Deborah L., Mark H. Thames, and Geoffrey C. Phelps. Content Knowledge for Teaching: What Makes It Special? Journal of Teacher Education 59, no. 5 (2008): 389-407. Hill, Heather C., and Deborah L. Ball. Learning Mathematics for Teaching: Results from Californias Mathematics Professional Development Institutes. Journal of Research in Mathematics Education 35, no. 5 (November 2004): 330-351. Hill, Heather C., Brian Rowan, and Deborah L. Ball. Effects of Teachers Mathematical Knowledge for Teach- ing on Student Achievement. American Educational Research Journal 42, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 371-406. Hill, Heather, Merrie Blunk, Charalambos Y. Charalambous, Jennifer M. Lewis, Geoffrey C. Phelps, Laurie Sleep, and Deborah L. Ball. Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching and the Mathematical Quality of Instruction: An Exploratory Study. Cognition and Instruction 26, no. 4 (2008): 430-511. National Mathematics Advisory Panel. Foundations for Success. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 2008. Rockoff, Jonah E., Brian A. Jacob, Thomas J. Kane, and Douglas O. Staiger. Can You Recognize an Effective Teacher When You Recruit One? NBER Working Paper 14485. Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2008. Shulman, Lee. Those Who Understand: Knowledge Growth in Teaching. Educational Researcher 15, no. 2 (February 1986): 4-14. Shulman, Lee. Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform. Harvard Educational Review 57, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 1-22. Wilson, Suzanne, Lee S. Shulman, and Anna Richert. 150 Different Ways of Knowing: Representations of Knowledge in Teaching. In Exploring Teachers Thinking, ed. James Calderhead, pp. 104-124. London: Cassell, 1987. pdkintl.org V91 N2 Kappan 71 JIunlimited/Stockxpert Copyright Notice Phi Delta Kappa International, Inc., holds copyright to this article, which may be reproduced or otherwise used only in accordance with U.S. law governing fair use. MULTIPLE copies, in print and electronic formats, may not be made or distributed without express permission from Phi Delta Kappa International, Inc. All rights reserved. Note that photographs, artwork, advertising, and other elements to which Phi Delta Kappa does not hold copyright may have been removed from these pages. All images included with this document are used with permission and may not be separated from this editoral content or used for any other purpose without the express written permission of the copyright holder. Please fax permission requests to the attention of KAPPAN Permissions Editor at 812/339-0018 or e-mail permission requests to kappan@pdkintl.org. For further information, contact: Phi Delta Kappa International, Inc. 408 N. Union St. P.O. Box 789 Bloomington, Indiana 47402-0789 812/339-1156 Phone 800/766-1156 Tollfree 812/339-0018 Fax http://www.pdkintl.org Find more articles using PDKs Publication Archives Search at http://www.pdkintl.org/search.htm. k0910hil.pdf Heather Hill and Deborah Loewenberg Ball, R&D: The Curious and Crucial Case of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching, Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 91, No. 2, October 2009, pp. 68-71. File Name and Bibliographic Information
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