Behm & Lloyd (2009)

In their chapter Factors Influencing Student Teachers' Use of Mathematics Curriculum Materials, Stephanie L. Behm and Gwendolyn M. Lloyd describe how three elementary student teachers used their curriculum materials and the factors that influenced curriculum use.

Detailed Chapter Summary

Teachers' Use of Textbooks and Curriculum Materials

Behm and Lloyd explain that research so far has said relatively little about how curriculum use varies across teachers with different levels of experience. Beginning teachers tend to appreciate and rely on guidence from their texts (Kauffman, Johnson, Kardos, Liu, & Peske, 2002; Remillard & Bryans, 2004), suggesting that experienced teachers might use their texts differently.

Preservice Teachers and Mathematics Curriculum Materials

Student teaching is an important and impressionable time for preservice teachers (Feiman-Nemser (1983); Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1985; Guyton & McIntyre, 1990). Ball & Feiman-Nemser (1988) found that student teachers got the impression that good teachers do not need to follow a textbook or teacher guide, which they identified as a "significant dilimma" given the expectations that new teachers will be required to use a text. There is some research about how preservice teachers interact with curriculum materials in their teacher education coursework (Hjalmarson, 2005; Lloyd, 2006; Lloyd & Behm, 2005; Tarr & Papick, 2004), but how that might influence future practice is not well known.

Research Context

Three white female undergraduates in their early twenties were the subjects for this study, and data was collected during their last 7 weeks of student teaching in the spring of 2004. Most data consisted of classroom observations and interviews, and methodological details are available in reports of the individual teachers (Behm & Lloyd, 2008; Lloyd, 2007, 2008). Two student teachers, Heather and Anne, completed their student teaching in a mostly white, rural/suburban district that used Everyday Mathematics as their standard curriculum. The third teacher, Bridget, used the commercially developed Silver Burdett Ginn curriculum in an urban, high-poverty district with predominantly African American students.

The Student Teachers' Ways of Using Their Curriculum Materials

Heather's Use of Standards-Based Curriclum Materials

Heather made extensive use of the teacher's guide, planning on the weekends and then reviewing it before each lesson. Because of this, she didn't feel that making detailed lesson plans of her own were necessary. She followed Everyday Mathematics's lesson plans carefully during the class, claiming, "I feel like the teacher's guide is a script, so I always have it with me. A lot of times, I feel like if I miss a paragraph in the book then maybe that will throw the lesson off" (p. 209). Heather did make adjustments for time when she was not able to proceed through the lesson as quickly as the teacher's guide suggested.

Anne's Use of Standards-Based Curriculum Materials

Anne worked with her supervising teachers to plan instruction and made photocopies from the Everyday Mathematics teacher's guide for the parts she needed. She annotated these lessons with some of her own ideas, claiming, "It's a lot of make up your own approach. I make notes to myself, sometimes just underlining and sometimes it's actually writing out what I'm going to need to do" (p. 209). Anne modified both the content and time allotment for lessons and rarely used the copies of the teacher's guide during lessons. Also, because Anne's class was structured so she would teach the same lesson to multiple groups of students, she would further adapt lessons in response to how each group performed.

Bridget's Use of a Commerically-Developed Textbook

Bridget used the workbook supplied with the Silver Burdett Ginn curriculum and supplemented additional tasks and activities. She met weekly with other kindergarten teachers to plan lessons, and commented that "I've been told several times that I needed to make sure that [the students] are getting plenty of paperwork" (p. 210). She felt that other parts of the Silver Burdett Ginn curriculum did not fit the school's needs and thus teachers in her school never used it for full lessons. Instead, they relied on the workbook for practice problems aligned to state standards, the coverage of which were reported to the school principal. Bridget planned independently to adapt or design additional materials that aligned with the district curriculum framework.

Metadata

APA

Behm, S. L., & Lloyd, G. M. (2009). Factors influencing student teachers’ use of mathematics curriculum materials. In J. T. Remillard, B. A. Herbel-Eisenmann, & G. M. Lloyd (Eds.), Mathematics teachers at work: Connecting curriculum materials and classroom instruction (pp. 205–222). New York, NY: Routledge.

BibTeX

@incollection{Behm2009,
address = {New York, NY},
author = {Behm, Stephanie L and Lloyd, Gwendolyn M.},
booktitle = {Mathematics teachers at work: Connecting curriculum materials and classroom instruction},
chapter = {15},
editor = {Remillard, Janine T and Herbel-Eisenmann, Beth A and Lloyd, Gwendolyn M},
mendeley-groups = {Archive/Book Sections},
pages = {205--222},
publisher = {Routledge},
title = {{Factors influencing student teachers' use of mathematics curriculum materials}},
year = {2009}
}

Mendeley

http://www.mendeley.com/research/factors-influencing-student-teachers-mathematics-curriculum-materials/