ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter, first and foremost, is to foreground the influence that teacher groups can bring to bear on lines of research into mathematics education. By way of background, I describe my own professional trajectory (and that of the research group I coordinate), the driving force of which has been the search for the key factors of and for teacher development. Over the years the focus of the group’s interests has evolved, largely under the influence of those members who are practising teachers. Among the central elements promoting professional development, our studies have highlighted teacher knowledge as particularly significant, and both researchers and teachers converge in their belief that joint reflection on the nature of one’s knowledge is instrumental in developing teacher performance and as a result enhances students’ learning experience. In order to explore the kind of knowledge teachers deploy, the research group developed an analytical model, called the Mathematics Teacher’s Specialized Knowledge (MTSK). I briefly describe the main features of this model and then give an example of how it can be put to use in the analysis of the classroom performance of one of the participating teachers. The analysis brings to the fore various kinds of specialist knowledge pertaining to the subdomains of the MTSK model. Of particular note in this instance is the evidence of the teacher’s knowledge about how one works and how one builds mathematics, a process which has its analogue in the reflective practices of the research group. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of the applications of specialized knowledge.
