Pre-service secondary teachers learning to engage in mathematical practices

The Common Core Standards require students to learn content and mathematical practices, and so teachers must have content knowledge and be able to engage in practices themselves. This raises the question of how novice teachers learn to engage in mathematical practices. I investigate pre-service secondary teacher learning of mathematical practices following participation in a mathematics content course for teachers using a pre/post design. Four participants completed think-aloud interviews solving algebra tasks. All participants increased their engagement in mathematical practices and began to engage in them in more nuanced ways. Many changes in participants’ practice engagement were related to opportunities to learn in the content course around making sense of problems, justification, and attention to precision. These results have important implications for teacher preparation and research on teacher learning.