The Structure of Student Teaching Can Change the Focus to Students’ Mathematical Thinking

Abstract

This paper describes our efforts to change the focus of our student teaching experience by altering the structure of that experience. We provide evi- dence that the restructuring accomplished its purposes and, in so doing, addressed a number of problems with the traditional structure it replaced. In particular, we achieved less focus on issues of classroom management and student behavior, more focus on students’ mathematics, and substantial opportunity to grapple with the elicitation, interpretation and use of student mathematical thinking during class discussion. Although there is still room for improvement, our model provides an existence proof that the focus of the student teaching experience can indeed be altered and improved.