This NSF CCLI Phase 1 project is developing and researching the effectiveness of innovative learning materials and teaching strategies based on professional teaching cases for use in mathematics content courses for preservice elementary teachers. These professional teaching cases are video and text documents that demonstrate teaching situations to promote discussion of issues related to mathematics, mathematics teaching, and mathematics learning. The cases are used to create contexts that facilitate preservice teachers' recognition and understanding of their implicit assumptions about the mathematics and the teaching and learning of mathematics while at the same time broadening their knowledge of students' mathematical thinking. This project is also producing facilitator guides to enable mathematics faculty, who teach content courses for teachers, to develop expertise in the area of professional teaching cases, a medium with which they are most likely unfamiliar.
The broader impacts from this project are not limited to the dissemination of the professional cases and the facilitators guide on the project website. The research results from this project are contributing to the growing understanding of how to support preservice teachers' learning of the mathematical knowledge needed for teaching. The project's evaluation includes a comprehensive mixed methods approach to assessing the context, input, process, and product of the project.
