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In the past two decades, there has been a trend in materials for mathematics courses for prospective secondary teachers: more opportunities for teachers to “apply mathematics to teaching”. That is, materials increasingly highlight how mathematical knowledge learned in the course can be useful in secondary teaching, and provide opportunities for teachers to harness this knowledge in simulations of teaching. There is little known about the effects of this curricular reform on teachers’ competence. In this report, we use data from the Mathematics of Doing, Understanding, Learning, and Educating for Secondary Schools MODULE(S2) project to examine the potential impact of using such curricular materials. The data include over 300 prospective secondary teachers’ responses to 3 sets of Likert pre-/post-term surveys addressing: mathematical knowledge for teaching; expectancy for enacting selected core teaching practices; and valuing of enacting these practices. We found mean increases across the survey results. We conclude with directions for future research on the impact of this curricular reform. 

Paper presented at the 2021 Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association, as part of the symposium Opportunities and Challenges Associated with Approximations of Practice in Teacher Education Programs In 1964, Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan proposed a then-radical idea in media theory: We should study not only content of messages, but also the impact of the medium itself, on society. He captured this idea in the phrase: The medium is the message. We take this idea into the study of teachers’ approximations of practice. We ask: Can the creation medium impact teachers’ approximation of practice, especially their recomposition of practice? The purpose of the study reported in this paper is to investigate differences in how prospective teachers may decompose and recompose practice during video and written approximations of practice. By written approximation of practice, we refer to a response to an assignment such as producing (parts of) a lesson plan; by video approximation of practice, we refer to a response to an assignment such as video recording oneself responding to a (hypothetical) student. 

In our project, we develop curricular materials to support prospective secondary teachers’ development of MKT and provide professional development (PD) opportunities for instructors ho will teach with these materials. In this paper, we examine the ways in which mathematics faculty engage in the teaching rehearsal debriefs included in the PD to answer the question: To what instructional interactions do instructors of mathematics content courses attend during rehearsal debriefs enacted in PD? Findings show that mathematics instructors attend to all types of interactions but attention is influenced by instructors’ mathematical knowledge.