Abstract

Teaching is a complex practice, in part because of all the decisions teachers make daily. This is especially true for student teachers who have little to no prior teaching experience to inform them about the decisions that need to be made in the classroom and how to reason through all those decisions as they plan and enact the lessons. Secondary mathematics student teachers were introduced to the Instructional Pyramid (Dingman et al., 2021) which organizes and maps teacher’s mathematical reasoning onto four elements of a classroom—teacher, student, mathematics, and curriculum—to examine which curricular reasoning aspects they use while planning mathematics lessons. A curricular reasoning survey, planning session video, and interviews throughout the student teachers’ semester illuminate which curricular reasoning aspects the student teachers reasoned with and attended to while planning their lessons. The results of this study indicate that the student teachers used student-centered reasoning to influence their lesson while planning, yet their own mathematical reasoning went unexamined. Student teachers used the curricular reasoning survey as a tool to understand a research lens. I found three key ideas that influenced student teachers’ reasoning: the importance of having pre-service teachers reflect on their planning, the role of curriculum during planning, and the importance of the involvement of a mentor teacher in the planning process.

Degree

College and Department

Computational, Mathematical, and Physical Sciences; Mathematics Education

Rights

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