Students from Pacific backgrounds in Aotearoa New Zealand are under-represented amongst those taking mathematics beyond compulsory levels. International testing suggests that Pacific students are under-served by the current mathematics teaching and assessment system. While researchers, teachers and policymakers debate why this may be, the voices of students themselves are not often heard. This study worked with 48 Pacific students of post-compulsory mathematics from five schools to understand their experience of mathematics teaching and learning. The research questions were:

What do Pacific students experience and value in senior secondary school mathematics classrooms?

How do they view their relationships with mathematics?

How would they change school mathematics teaching for it to work better for them?

The study uses Pacific framing for its theoretical basis, data collection and analysis. In this holistic view, Pacific students are seen as embedded in family and community, rather than as individuals. Co-construction and relationality are foregrounded. Talanoa, a way of sharing and relating, was used to understand the students' experience. The talanoa sessions were led by trained Pacific researchers, using cultural protocols.

Thematic analysis yielded eight teaching practices that the Pacific students felt would improve the experience of mathematics for them and for others. The eight practices were: plan opportunities for one to one, expect achievement, monitor pace, make it clear and relevant, make connections explicit, try another way if we don’t understand, recognise that we are good at mathematics, and understand that mathematics, and our achievement in mathematics, matters a lot to our families.

These actionable practices can be seen as describing equitable teaching from the perspective of the students. They can also be thought of as quality teaching practices for Pacific mathematics learners. The idea of considering quality and equity from the perspective of learners has applications for other groups and settings.

Teachers frequently ask questions in mathematics classrooms, and effective questioning enables teachers to better assess their students’ understanding. To explore how pre-service teachers' questioning techniques evolve with experience, we conducted a case study examining the progress of two pre-service teachers during their 8-week teaching practicum at a private university’s Online Laboratory School (OLS), which served students across Turkey during the pandemic. These two pre-service teachers were selected because they taught the same mathematics content each week.

This study investigates the types of questions the pre-service teachers asked and how the quality of these questions developed over the 8-week period during which they planned, taught and reflected on their own teaching. Specifically, our research was guided by two main questions: (1) What types of questions did the pre-service teachers ask? (2) How did the quality of the pre-service teachers' questions evolve from the first to the last lesson during the OLS experience?

The study employed a qualitative analysis based on "the questioning framework" developed by Weiland et al. (2014). Recorded lessons were transcribed, and the questions were coded by two independent researchers. Through collaborative decision-making, the questions were categorized according to the framework in the following way: protocol, repeat, clarifying, competent, instructing rather than assessing (leading or teaching and telling). In addition to the framework, inviting type of questions to facilitate participation of students emerged during open coding of the data.

The findings indicate that with appropriate guidance and practical experience, pre-service teachers can improve their questioning skills. Over time, there was an increase in the use of competent, thought-provoking questions, such as those encouraging students to analyze mathematical arguments or solutions, while the use of leading questions diminished. The results suggest that participation in OLS activities positively influenced the pre-service teachers' ability to ask questions that extended students' mathematical thinking.

Elementary teachers often have hindering beliefs about mathematics and how to teach. The impact on student learning is exacerbated in high-needs or historically disenfranchised schools. This project answers, what are the ways a program’s math methods courses impacted beliefs that restrict quality mathematics instruction? Using the mathematical wounds framework, we analyze teachers’ beliefs about mathematics, teaching and learning, and beliefs about themselves as a doer and teacher of mathematics. The mathematical wounds framework includes three approaches for addressing mathematical wounds: unpacking experiences in the mathematics classroom, engaging in the process of doing mathematics, and enacting high-quality teaching practices. This research is guided by the re(humanizing) perspective (Gutiérrez, 2018); using self-study I explore mathematics teacher educator practice to better understand how professional learning tools support early career elementary teachers engage in rich mathematical activities. While the re(humanizing) perspective attend specifically to the teaching of mathematics, for this research, it was used to guide research methodology and course design. This research employs self-study with collaborations between the professor and students, situated with a minority serving institution in the US. The program serves uncertified graduate students currently working in high-needs schools. Preliminary findings show that teachers experienced major shift regarding beliefs about mathematics and best practice for teaching and learning mathematics. Beliefs about themselves as doers and teachers of mathematics show more complicated findings. While many report greater confidence in their mathematics proficiency and their ability to teach, many still report anxiety over facilitating student-lead discussions where the teacher’s lack of understanding might be exposed. This project seeks to identify quality mathematics teacher practices that supports early career teachers working in diverse backgrounds and circumstances. I seek to present in the S-STEP strand within the sub-theme of characteristics of quality teaching.

The research aims to explore the impact on more deprived children of teachers’ attitudes to teaching maths. The presentation will outline the validation process of a Perceptions of Mathematics (POM) survey to help identify teachers’ attitudes when teaching maths, distinguishing between teaching which is more procedural versus more conceptual.

The overall approach is informed by critical realism and rooted in expectancy value theory. If we expect to do well and value a subject we are studying, we are more likely to succeed in that subject even accounting for prior attainment. Negative messages poorer children pick up about maths are often from their community and family. Compounding these negative attitudes may be a differential approach by teachers when teaching maths to more deprived children. Poorer children are more likely to be exposed to procedural maths rather than the conceptual maths they need to achieve at a higher level.

The Perceptions of Maths survey was completed by 136 primary teachers with the results analysed using Principal Components Analysis to determine whether or not it is possible to identify a two component structure within the survey distinguishing procedural and conceptual approaches.

The 20 items of the POM were then subjected to PCA which found a two component structure in the survey supporting the distinction between conceptual maths values and procedural maths values.

The research links to equitable teaching practices. Teachers’ beliefs and attitudes have a direct impact on children’s outcomes. The research aims to help teachers understand how their beliefs about maths and relatively more deprived children can have an impact on children’s outcomes.

Classrooms are dominated by teacher talk, which averages 70%-80% of classroom time. Therefore, teachers' language preferences, use of language, and communication with pupils in teaching are significant factors that affect pupils' classroom experiences. This is more apparent in teaching mathematics due to its technical nature. Investigating teachers' use of language can give us clues about the quality of their understanding of the subject and their noticing levels. In this study, we investigated the interrelations among teachers' language use, knowledge, and noticing levels in mathematics and modelled such interrelations. Our main research question is: How do teachers’ use of language when responding to a mathematical task requiring an analysis of a division situation inform us about their knowledge and noticing level?

The participants were 142 volunteered teachers (81 males, 61 females) teaching mathematics at different school levels in the public schools of the United Arab Emirates, representing 11% of the mathematics teacher population. We used proportional stratified sampling to identify schools and recruited volunteered teachers from those schools to participate in the study. The data came from an up-to-two-hour problem-solving session with these teachers. One of the problems asked participants to think about a division problem that can have the answers of 4 1/3 and 4R1, explain its rationale, and clarify the underlying mathematical ideas a student needs to know to make sense of it. We analysed the teacher responses to this question both qualitatively and quantitatively, considering the language they used (every day, meaning-making, technical), the knowledge they drew on (common content versus specialised content knowledge), and their noticing (four levels). Our statistical analysis resulted in a model explaining the interrelations of these components, suggesting that teachers’ use of language is a significant indicator of the quality of their knowledge, and richer language use leads to higher noticing levels.