Jo Ann Cady

Negotiating Contexts to Construct an Identity as a Mathematics Teacher

ABSTRACT The authors focused on 1 middle-grades mathematics teachers identity and her efforts to implement standards-based instructional practices. As professionals, teachers participate in multiple professional communities and must negotiate and manage conflicting agendas. The authors analyze how the contexts of these communities influence the teachers identity and thus her teaching of mathematics.

The Effects of Poverty and Language on Mathematics Achievement for English Language Learners

This chapter acknowledges that access to mathematics plays a role in potential earnings and that this access is closed to English language learners (ELLs) and to students living in poverty. We provided evidence that poverty, academic language development, and discourse diversities are intertwined and cannot be easily separated when it comes to mathematical achievement. In fact, evidence is provided to suggest that English-speaking students living in poverty may be more severely impacted by discourse diversities and academic language development than ELLs. Even the discourse practices espoused by reform curricula can have a negative influence on the achievement of students in poverty. The authors suggest a pedagogical approach, such as Cognitively Guided Instruction, to aid both ELLs and students in poverty because of its focus on identifying and using what students already know to plan instruction and its focus on developing mathematical language through negotiation and discussion of students’ thinking.

Impacting Early Childhood Teachers' Understanding of the Complexities of Place Value.

In order to help children gain a more robust understanding of place value, teachers must understand the connections and relationships among the related concepts as well as possess knowledge of how children learn early number concepts. Unfortunately, teachers’ familiarity with the base-ten number system and/or lack of an understanding of multidigit whole numbers leads to instruction that encourages a superficial understanding of the concepts of our base-ten system rather than instruction that pushes students to go beyond recitation of the value of the digit in the tens place. This study highlights the attempts of three mathematics educators in reconceptualizing and impacting teachers’ understanding of place value concepts.