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Supporting A Standards-based Teaching And Learning Environment A Case Study Of An Expert Middle School Mathematics Teacher

Although it has been more than 20 years since the publication of Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM, 1989) and 10 years since the second version of standards, Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM, 2000), the research underlines the lack of essential practices for standards-based teaching (Franke, Kazemi, & Battey, 2007). The literature also emphasizes the importance of planning in standards-based teaching, although few studies focus on the direct planning of the teacher (Kilpatrick, Swafford, & Findell, 2001). The aim of the current study was to conduct a case study to extract the planning and classroom practices of an expert seventh grade mathematics teacher. The extracted practices were interpreted using the teaching-in-context theory which is based on the beliefs, goals, and knowledge of the teacher. The case study was conducted in a design experiment environment where the instructional sequence was revised based on the classroom instruction. The data were collected through different resources including videotapes of classroom sessions, teacher notes, students‟ artifacts, audiotapes of daily teacher interviews, weekly teacher meetings and classroom small groups in five weeks. Transcripts were used to observe the action patterns of the teacher during both planning and classroom practices. By triangulating the data, planning practices were separated into five categories: preparation, reflection, anticipation, assessment, and revision. These practices were interrelated in an environment of collaboration. Classroom practices also were categorized into five groups, namely creating and sustaining social norms, facilitating genuine mathematical discourse, supporting the development of sociomathematical norms, capitalizing on students‟ imagery to create inscriptions and notation, and developing small groups as communities of learners. Similar to the planning practices, these iii were also highly interrelated with social norms playing a key role in application of all other practices. The results showed that the expert teacher used a diverse set of practices with each practice comprised of multiple actions to create and sustain a standards-based environment. The results also indicated that standards-based teaching requires a rich and connected body of knowledge about students, curriculum, content, and literature. It was found that the depth of the teacher‟s knowledge allowed her to develop practices that were consistent with her beliefs and goals. Finally, the planning and classroom practices were found to be highly interrelated. While effective planning practices facilitated the application of standards-based teaching, the classroom teaching practices equipped the teacher with the data necessary to perform effective planning practices.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd-2581
Date01 January 2010
CreatorsAkyuz, Didem
PublisherSTARS
Source SetsUniversity of Central Florida
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceElectronic Theses and Dissertations

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