Professional Development of Mathematics Teachers, Volume 46, Number 5

General Background “You can’t teach what you don’t know”, but too many of our mathematics teachers may be doing exactly that: teaching what they don’t know. This is one of the key findings of the landmark 1983 education document A Nation at Risk. What was true back in 1983 is even more true today. Since the only way to achieve better mathematics education is to have better mathematics teachers, this intolerable situation cries out for a radical reform. There is no mystery to the needed reform: university mathematics departments must do a better job of teaching their students (preservice professional development), schools of education must start emphasizing the importance of subject matter content knowledge, and state governments must embark on large-scale and systematic efforts to retrain the mathematics teachers already in the classrooms (inservice professional development). The difficulty lies in the execution. The awareness by organizations of mathematicians of the need to coordinate university mathematics departments across the land in order to upgrade the preservice professional development of prospective teachers began to surface only in the past year. The Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences (CBMS) has since appointed a Steering Committee for the Mathematics Education of Teachers Project to begin work in this direction. As to the problem with schools of education, its gravity cannot, in my opinion, be overstated (cf. [1]). Recently, mathematics educators began to call for a broad base of mathematical knowledge for all teachers, especially those in K–6 (kindergarten through sixth grade). The remarkable recent volume [2] of Liping Ma, for example, deals with this very issue. Unlike most technical writings in education, Ma’s volume is easily accessible to mathematicians, and it also contains an ample listing of the relevant literature. This article is concerned with the third component of the proposed remedy: inservice professional development. Because any improvement in education must start with improvement of the teachers already in the classroom, this topic is one of real urgency. In addition, some understanding of this topic is indispensable to a sound decision on how to approach preservice professional development. In one way or another, the latter directly influences the professional lives of most of the readers of the Notices. Hung-Hsi Wu is professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. His e-mail address is [email protected].