Shifting Preservice Teachers' Sources of Mathematics Teaching Efficacy Through Scaffolded Reflection: Fostering Commitment to Reform-Based Mathematics

Introduction

Despite widespread efforts by teacher educators and those providing professional development to help teachers integrate reform-based mathematics approaches into their everyday instruction (McGee, Wang & Polly, 2013; Paolucci, 2015), traditional methods of teaching mathematics are still common (Hill et al. 2018). Teachers may focus classroom instruction on procedural computations without making deeper connections, and emphasize fact and skill recall instead of reasoning and problem solving even after professional development in reform-based mathematics instruction (NCTM, 2014; Paolucci, 2015). Indeed, research reveals that sometimes even teachers who appear to embrace reform-based mathematics principles may utilize more traditional approaches of instruction in their practice (e.g., Lane & Ríordáin, 2020).

Although many factors—including institutional, socio-economic, and cultural—may contribute to this puzzling pattern, the authors suggest that one important element largely missing from the discussion is “mathematics teaching efficacy,” defined as teachers’ or preservice teachers’ beliefs that they can effectively teach mathematics (Briley, 2012). This chapter explores mathematics teaching efficacy, explains why it is central to supporting and sustaining reform-based mathematics teaching, and describes some of the special challenges faced by mathematics educators who attempt to support its development. The authors argue that an opportune time to support and facilitate the development of mathematics teaching efficacy is during teacher preparation (Giles et al., 2016), when teacher beliefs may be more malleable than after years of classroom practice. This chapter describes the unique opportunities and challenges of encouraging the development of mathematics teaching efficacy beliefs for teaching reform-based mathematics with preservice elementary teachers. Examples of one of the author’s initial efforts to do so in an undergraduate mathematics methods course are included. The purpose of this description and accompanying examples is two-fold: it is intended to help focus the attention of both educational researchers and teacher educators on a potential roadblock to the adoption and sustained use of reform-based instructional methods in mathematics, and also to provide an illustration of how mathematics teaching efficacy can be facilitated within teacher education programs.