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Qualified Pedagogical Reflection as a Way to Improve Mathematics Education

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Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education Aims and scope Submit manuscript

May the teacher know what he teaches.

May the teacher know how to teach.

May the teacher be sincerely interested in teaching.

Comenius

Abstract

All changes of the character of education and improvement of its quality depend, in our view, particularly on the teacher. To be able to do their work efficiently, teachers have to be equipped with professional skills and dispositions, with “teachers’ competence”. For their professional growth, we consider indispensable competence in reflection, which is aimed at the teacher’s activities with regard to aspects of pedagogy and/or subject-didactics. From the point of view of the goals and content of their teaching and the methods of work (and their realisation), the development of teachers’ conscious self-reflection on their own teaching and systematic pursuance of joint reflection with other teachers and/or researchers can promote the teacher’s professional growth. In this paper, we show how a selected group of elementary school teachers reflected on their competence in the course of preparing, carrying out and analysing several instruction experiments. The paper is based on samples of teachers’ reflections and their gradual development from mere simple conversations based on intuitive perceptions, through searching for effective teaching approaches, to the deep assessment of mathematics teaching from the point of view of topics and their didactic elaboration and to suggestions for the teachers’ own experiments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mathematical Institute, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Zitna 25, 115 67, Prague, Czech Republic

    Marie Ticha

  2. Department of Mathematics, University of South Bohemia Ceske Budejovice, Jeronymova 10, 371 15, Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic

    Alena Hospesova

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  1. Marie Ticha
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  2. Alena Hospesova
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Correspondence to Alena Hospesova.

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Ticha, M., Hospesova, A. Qualified Pedagogical Reflection as a Way to Improve Mathematics Education. J Math Teacher Educ 9, 129–156 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10857-006-6893-7

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