Page 114 - Children’s mathematical development and learning needs in perspective of teachers’ use of dynamic math interviews

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Chapter 4
Teacher factors regarding mathematics teaching
Teachers’ ability to create opportunities for all children and adjust their teaching to meet a variety of additional support needs is the cornerstone of mathematics teaching (Forgasz & Cheeseman, 2015). In order to meet the different educational needs of diverse learners in a mathematics classroom context, teachers must be competent in coping with a diversity of learning trajectories, and providing support during learning. For mathematics teaching to be successful, teachers need an informed view of children’ understanding of mathematics and their educational math needs (Deunk et al., 2018). Therefore, teachers need pedagogical, didactical and subject knowledge and the ability to effectively apply this knowledge within mathematics lessons. This might, for example, involve create a sequence of tasks or drawing a model or diagram and encouraging children to explain their strategy. Teachers also need insight into their children’ current mathematical thinking as well as tools and strategies for representing and explaining mathematics that are in line with children’ educational needs (Reynolds & Muijs, 1999). Dynamic math interviews can help provide this insight (Allsopp et al., 2008). Such insight refers to the ability to make efficacious decisions regarding child-related instructional goals, to master relevant prior knowledge and skills within several mathematical domains, to recognize children’s preconceptions or misconceptions, to assess children’s motivation and to group and support children according to ability (Hoth et al., 2016). Teachers who pursue effective mathematics teaching appear to use some general structural aspects of differentiation, such as achievement grouping combined with differentiation (Prast et al., 2018). Deunk et al. (2018) showed that teachers found it challenging to provide refined adaptations that met an individual child’s math learning needs.
Various teacher factors influence mathematics teaching. To gain comprehensive insight into professional mathematics teaching abilities, Kaiser et al. (2017) posited three keys to successful mathematics teaching: mathematics teaching behavior, self-efficacy in regard to teaching mathematics and mathematical knowledge for teaching.