Abstract
Interviews with SimCalc teachers in the Democratizing Access to Core Mathematics Across Grades 9–12 study led to unexpected insights into instructional practices—and teacher beliefs that informed those practices. We found that working with SimCalc, over time, changed some teachers’ routine instructional practices and challenged them to reconsider their views about how children learn mathematics. These transformations were different across teachers but patterns emerged that could be linked to the amount of time teachers spent in the project, and to the instructional approaches inherent in SimCalc.
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Notes
- 1.
The project was funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences (IES), Grant No. R305B070430.
- 2.
Teachers sometimes identified themselves as embracing constructivist pedagogy, rather than a more traditional representational view. Video samples of their teaching often did not support these claims. In all likelihood, what the teacher believed to be a constructivist stance was different from the understanding of the researcher.
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Tapper, J. (2013). Changing from the Inside Out: SimCalc Teacher Changes in Beliefs and Practices. In: Hegedus, S., Roschelle, J. (eds) The SimCalc Vision and Contributions. Advances in Mathematics Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5696-0_15
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