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Are education systems converging toward a global model of teacher education or do local models tend to predominate in spite of attempts to reform them? How much do global, national, and local cultures shape and condition future teachers’ opportunities to learn to teach? How do these opportunities influence teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge? In this chapter we use data from the IEA’s first study of the effectiveness of pre-service teacher education in order to investigate teacher education policy, program structure, and outcomes. Using multilevel modeling we found that across countries individual characteristics have a similar and powerful influence on what future teachers come to know at the end of their pre-service programs. The effects of teacher education curriculum on future teachers’ mathematics pedagogical content knowledge reaffirm the prevalence of local cultures on the implementation of an increasingly globalized ideal. We conclude that while the provision of teacher education shares many common features in goals and structure across countries, it is strongly influenced by local conditions and norms, and by cultural notions of the knowledge that is considered essential – framing how quality is to be defined and operationalized – when learning to teach.

In this chapter, three educators recount experiences of professional development from different perspectives in order to examine the intersection of teacher knowledge and subject matter in the areas of science and mathematics education. Professional development projects are productive avenues for exploring this phenomenon. We share stories of experience from professional develop projects of teachers who were situated in different places on the professional knowledge landscape: one elementary school teacher, one teacher educator, and one mathematics educator. From these various vantage points, the relationship between mathematics and science content knowledge and teacher knowledge holds different complexities and complications. Issues related to balancing teacher knowledge with content knowledge in professional development emerge. Based on the stories of experience and the analysis of the narratives, deliberation of curriculum is seen to be a valuable concept when engaging in professional development with teachers. Further, Pragmatic Intellectual Space is proposed for productive approaches to professional development.

Policymakers have focused on improving STEM outcomes for US high school students for over 50 years. Much of this focus has centered on improving the quality of STEM teachers, particularly in poor and minority schools. Few, if any, of these efforts have considered the importance of the content knowledge of those providing instructional leadership in schools – namely, principals and assistant principals. This chapter examines the percentage of school leaders with teacher certification in mathematics or science and the degree to which teacher and school leader turnover interrupts the leadership–teacher relationships. The study concludes relatively few school leaders have the content knowledge to provide deep instructional leadership. Moreover, the study finds combined teacher and school leader turnover greatly diminishes the sustained relationships between instructional leaders and teachers, particularly in lower-performing schools.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the challenges of instructional leadership in prekindergarten (PK) programs in the context of small and mid-sized school districts. We first explore issues that characterize current PK education including the need for content standards and curriculum, Developmentally Appropriate Practices (DAP), Mathematics Pedagogical Content Knowledge, and addressing mathematics anxiety and teacher-efficacy. We then turn to instructional leadership for PK education and the challenges that leader preparation and district program structures cause for instructional leadership. Often instructional experts have limited exposure to PK classrooms housed in traditional elementary buildings. Additionally, elementary principals are typically ill-prepared with the knowledge needed to support and develop teacher MPCK and effective learning contexts in PK classrooms. Typical preparation and professional development programs offer limited support for building principals as PK instructional leaders. Implications for building principals include the need to engage professional communities, utilize collaborative processes such as team observations, and leverage the collective efficacy and expertise of PK educators in their schools and districts.

Research over the last decade or so has made it clear that quality teachers matter to student achievement. What is less clear is the ways in which they matter and how we can prepare such high-quality teachers. Nowhere is this lack of clarity more evident than in special education, where we have few studies on teacher quality and even fewer studies on the type of preparation opportunities that would lead to high quality. Thus, it is difficult to make evidence-based decisions about how quality special education teachers should be defined and prepared. As a field, we have to turn to research in general education to provide a sense of some of the dimensions of teacher quality and effective teacher education. In this chapter, we provide a summary of the research on characteristics of highly qualified teachers and what we know from the research on teacher education and professional development that might foster these qualities, both in general and in special education. Part of our discussion centers on the concerns surrounding this body of research and the challenges of applying the findings to the field of special education. Although these challenges pose considerable problems, we are optimistic that potential solutions exist and can be reached through an alignment of initial teacher education and induction.

For more than a decade there have been calls to change professional development and teacher education. A central task and challenge for teacher educators is to design learning experiences that offer the greatest potential for improving teacher practice. Recently, videos of classrooms have emerged as tools for teacher learning. This chapter will consider the issues we faced attempting to create a coherent, sequenced professional development curriculum using video to help teachers improve mathematics teaching and learning. We will share some of the principles that guided the work, what we’ve been learning and indicate where we feel more research is needed.

The goal of this chapter is to gain a better understanding of the experiences of mathematics anxiety that some women elementary preservice teachers encounter while learning mathematics during their own K-12 years. Specifically, this chapter is an analysis of the personal well-remembered events (WREs) told and recorded by women during their preservice teaching professional sequence. These narrative writings provide a powerful voice for the degree to which mathematics anxiety shape preservice teachers’ beliefs on what it means to learn mathematics. This intersection of teacher knowledge is important, as these are women who are on the professional track to teach mathematics. The focused analysis for this chapter is aimed at ways in which teacher preparation programs could broaden current views of women who have anxiety and confidence issues in mathematics.

In this chapter, we explore two intersecting plotlines of teacher knowledge and content knowledge through an experience in which we engaged our teacher candidates during our mathematics methods course. Teacher candidates were tasked with the challenge of creating hands-on, interactive activities for small groups of fifth-grade students based on a selected Common Core State Standard for Mathematics (CCSS-M) related to the area of fractions. Responsible for both planning and preparing their activities, the teacher candidates were the curriculum designers. What we designed as the practice teaching activity involved a morning of planning and implementing a fraction activity with small groups of fifth-graders in short sessions, making adjustments, prompting and cueing students, extending learning, managing behaviors and distractibility – experiencing the early challenges and rewards of their first experiences in teaching – gaining practice and feedback. Forming the core of this chapter is a narrative construction of Michelle’s personal experience working with teacher candidates and fifth-grade students in practice teaching spaces for the first time, discovering moments along with our students, when they bridged the expansive gap from living as education students to feeling like beginning teachers. Teacher candidates’ responses to the experience and reflections on their challenges and successes are shared.

In this chapter, we discuss cases involving pre-service mathematics teachers. These cases highlight teachers’ understanding of perspectives as they solve and analyze student work involving tasks that call for translations between algebraic and graphical representations. Findings suggest that flexible or inflexible knowledge structures influence participant’s attempt to analyze or address student thinking.

Findings from this study highlight a major concern for teacher education and IBL efforts. If teachers do not have a flexible knowledge base to draw from, teachers may fail to capture important aspects of students’ thinking and help students develop appropriate understandings. Such failure may result in missed opportunities to effectively assist students to explore, create and communicate, ideas that are core to IBL.

Students with mathematics-related learning difficulties (MLD) experience difficulties in many areas of mathematics achievement; without intervention, these difficulties will persist. In this chapter, I first review research examined cognitive processes deficits of MLD. Because difficulties in learning mathematics are presumably due to these cognitive deficits, findings of these studies can shed light on developing effective intervention programs. Second, using Response to Intervention (RTI) as a framework to distinguish the intensity level of intervention, I review findings from existing Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention studies and synthesize the instructional approaches used in these studies as well as the factors researchers used to intensify the intervention. Finally, Data-Based Individualization (DBI), a systematic approach to intensify intervention, commonly used at the Tier 3 level, is review. Suggestions for future research directions for intensive mathematics intervention are also provided.