Shared Mission
A distinctive characteristic of mathematics education at the University of Delaware is that we are committed to a shared mission of improving teaching through systematic, innovative, research-based strategies. Faculty, doctoral students, and undergraduate pre-service teachers are working together toward the long-term goal of improving instructional practice in a cumulative and lasting way. Achieving this goal, in our context, means (1) learning ourselves, as faculty and doctoral students, how to improve our instruction of the courses we teach for pre-service teachers, and (2) helping pre-service teachers learn how to study and improve their practice when they begin teaching.
We recognize the challenge of improving instruction, especially improving instruction for all students. For the past 100 years, since records have been kept, instructional practice in school mathematics classrooms has changed very little. Many changes have been made at the margins but the core of teaching, the way in which the teacher and students interact around mathematics, remains the same. The persistence of instructional practice qualifies it as one of the most challenging educational problems of our day, and the centrality of instructional practice for defining learning opportunities for all students makes it one of the most important problems to solve. We are tackling this problem head-on by studying our own practices.
Guided by a conceptual framework that identifies the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to study and improve instructional practice, instructor groups of faculty and doctoral students meet weekly to plan lessons for the pre-service mathematics content and methods courses, design and test revisions to these lessons, and conduct research studies that inform our continual revisions of content and pedagogy. Details of the conceptual framework can be found in papers that appeared in the Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education (volume 6, issue 3, pages 201-222) and the Journal of Teacher Education (volume 58, pages 47-61).
Although we expect the improvement of our instructional practice and of the courses we teach to continue indefinitely (it is part of the culture of doing mathematics education at UD), we also find that lessons we learn about improving teaching can be shared with the larger community. That is, in addition to improving our own program, we share the knowledge we are building about how to support pre-service teachers' learning of mathematics content and pedagogy with teacher educators and researchers at other institutions. And, we share the insights we acquire about the process of enabling cumulative and lasting improvement with the broader education community. The ultimate goal is to solve the problem we identified above: to steadily improve students' learning opportunities, not just for some students and not just in special locations but for all students, through the steady improvement of instructional practice, with each generation of teachers building on what others have learned to improve their own practice.
