E-Book Overview
This book develops a framework for discussing primary school teachers making changes to their understandings and practices. The framework has been developed to allow the complexity of external and internal aspects of change processes to be explored in a holistic way. External factors influencing teachers include increased specification of the curriculum, changing demands for styles of pedagogy and a rhetoric of Lifelong Learning. Such factors have to be looked at in relation to individual teacher's internal responses to mathematics. For many primary school teachers mathematics is a subject that causes concern; its place within their personal biographies may be uncomfortable and replete with memories of confusion, pain and limited success. Professional understandings of mathematics build upon the understandings from personal histories. Discussing teacher change within the interplay of the external and internal is inherently difficult. Responses to this difficulty have tended to take the form of simplifying the task and dealing with the external separately from the internal. This book will be of interest to a wide range of people working in the field of primary mathematics education, including policy makers, Initial Teacher Education lecturers, Master's students and researchers, practising primary school teachers and those engaged in the management of mathematics in primary schools. While the context of the book is specific to a period of time when a National Numeracy Strategy was being introduced into schools in England, the themes that the chapters tackle are broader and consider issues of interest to anyone concerned with the development of mathematics teaching.
E-Book Content
PRIMARY MATHEMATICS AND THE DEVELOPING PROFESSIONAL Multiple Perspectives on Attainment in Numeracy Volume 1 of 4 Primary Mathematics and the Developing Professional Edited by Alison Millett Department of Education and Professional Studies, King’s College London, U.K. Margaret Brown Department of Education and Professional Studies, King’s College London, U.K. and Mike Askew Department of Education and Professional Studies, King’s College London, U.K. KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS NEW YORK, BOSTON, DORDRECHT, LONDON, MOSCOW eBook ISBN: Print ISBN: 1-4020-1915-7 1-4020-1914-9 ©2004 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. Print ©2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers Dordrecht All rights reserved No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without written consent from the Publisher Created in the United States of America Visit Springer's eBookstore at: and the Springer Global Website Online at: http://www.ebooks.kluweronline.com http://www.springeronline.com TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES xiii LIST OF FIGURES xv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xvii INTRODUCTION xix Margaret Brown 1. The international context 2. The meaning of numeracy 3. The National Numeracy Strategy 4. The Leverhulme Numeracy Research Programme 4.1. The Core Project: Tracking Numeracy 4.2. Focus Project: Case Studies of Pupil Progress 4.3. Focus Project: Teachers’ Knowledge, Conceptions and Practices and Pupils’ Learning 4.4. Focus Project: Whole School Action on Numeracy 4.5. Focus Project: School and Community Numeracies 4.6. Focus Project: Primary CAME (Cognitive Acceleration in Mathematics Education) 4.7. Relation to the National Numeracy Strategy 4.8. Coherence of themes 5. References CHAPTER 1. THE CONTEXT FOR CHANGE: A MODEL FOR DISCUSSION Alison Millett and Tamara Bibby 1. Introduction 2. A model for discussing change 2.1. The zone of enactment 2.2. The person 2.3. The situation – the professional community and the pupils 2.4