Abstract
As an experienced mathematics teacher educator, how can I creatively disrupt my current practices? In this chapter I describe what happened when I invited a teacher educator of social studies into my classroom to help me challenge my assumptions and reframe my practice. Would a critical friend, with similar passions about teacher education but a different discipline expertise, help me to see things that a colleague from maths education might not see? Certain issues arose in our discussions, including my nervousness before classes, my efforts to build a safe and welcoming environment for the students, the relative importance of our different subject areas, the aims we each hold for our classes, and our thoughts about control. I found that my ideas of maths teaching, highly influenced by reform notions of maths education, needed to be made more visible to my critical friend. This gave me important insights into the assumptions I hold that might need to be made more explicit to my students. The critical friendship did disrupt my complacency, and it also stimulated my thinking about my aims for my teaching and for my students’ learning. For both of us, the critical friendship contributed a different set of lenses with which to view our teaching.
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Schuck, S. (2011). Resisting Complacency: My Teaching Through an Outsider’s Eyes. In: Schuck, S., Pereira, P. (eds) What Counts in Teaching Mathematics. Self Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0461-9_5
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