TERRY WOOD and BETSY BERRY

EDITORIAL
WHAT DOES DESIGN RESEARCH OFFER
MATHEMATICS TEACHER EDUCATION?
In a previous editorial for JMTE (5.3) I argued for the importance of
generating and sharing knowledge about the complexity in mathematics
teaching. One reason I gave for the need to create a shared knowledge base
of mathematics teaching was that this would allow us to create approaches
to teacher development that would insure that teachers can accomplish
the substantial changes to meet the demands of teaching (p. 202). For this
issue, Betsy Berry and I consider the landscape of research in education
with respect to teacher education approaches, programs, or models in light
of design research.
The research in general teacher education and mathematics teacher
education is voluminous and provides extensive results and evidence about
approaches to teacher development. And yet we still are unable to identify
approaches to teacher education to insure that teachers meet the demand
to develop relative to the complexity in mathematics teaching. In this
Editorial, we argue that design research and the accompanying design
experiments offer a possible way to tackle this situation.
Design research as a type of research is currently receiving consider-
able attention in the United States as evidenced by the recent special issue
of the Educational Researcher (Kelly, 2003) published by the American
Educational Research Association (AERA). Design research is commonly
viewed as an approach that makes use of existing traditional research nd-
ings to develop some type of product, in the case of teacher education,
programs for professional development.
Design research can be characterized in the following ways: First, a
physical or theoretical artifact or product is created. For the researcher/
teacher educator the product being developed and tested is the profes-
sional development model itself. For the teacher, the product that they
design and study is specic to their students and might be an assess-
ment tool or strategy or implementation guideline for a particular mathe-
matics lesson, and so forth. Second, the product is tested, implemented,
reected upon and revised through cycles of iterations. The model is
dynamic and emergent as the process progresses. Third, multiple models
Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education 6: 195199, 2003.
2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
196 TERRY WOOD AND BETSY BERRY
and theories are called upon in the design and revision of the products.
Fourth, design research of this nature is situated soundly in the contextual
setting of the mathematics teachers day-to-day environment, but results
should be shareable and generalizeable across a broader scope. Fifth, the
teacher educator/researcher is an interventionist rather than a participant
observer in a collaborative, reective relationship with the teacher(s) as
the professional development model evolves and is tested and revised.
Consider for example, a professional development design that com-
bines and weaves together a collaborative learning experience for teachers
that includes selected elements from action research (Miller & Hunt,
1994), Japanese lesson study (Lewis, 2000) or reective practice groups
and communities of practice (Stein et al., 1998). All of these models
have supporting studies that document success for teacher development
described in different ways. Some describe growth in mathematics content
knowledge or changes in teacher beliefs or teaching efcacy or perhaps
change in classroom practice and increased questioning skills. All of
these concerns are inherent in the professional development of both pre-
service and practicing mathematics teachers. While it remains impossible
to address all things at all times, design research allows us to consider the
complexities of mathematics teaching and of teacher development in our
initial design and in our reections and revisions of the model.
In our proposed design, participating teams of teachers might design
classroom environments and teaching tools for the implementation of
complex problem solving activities with their students as they collaborate
with the researchers/professional developers. Researchers and professional
developers might combine elements of reective practice to promote
teachers learning through reection. They might also bring teachers
together to create collaborative groups in which the joint work centers on
crafting of lessons that comprises lesson study.
A research design of this nature would provide parallels and integra-
tion of the work of the teacher educators with the work of the teachers
with the work of their students. At all levels there would be an environ-
ment of dynamic cyclical change. In this research model teachers must
pass through cycles as they consider the problem of facilitating the
perfect environment for their students learning and teacher educators
would pass through cycles as they design the perfect environment
for teacher learning. The design of this professional development model
requires that teacher educators and teachers collaborate and share the joint
work of all aspects of the process including the designing, reecting on and
revising of the model throughout the cycles but in different ways and for
different purposes. It has been said of education, and mathematics educa-
EDITORIAL 197
tion in particular, that were trying to y the airplane and x it at the
same time. Taking a design research approach allows us to acknowledge
that we (teachers, teacher educators, researchers, policy makers) are and
can be pilots, maintenance crew, designers and test pilots for the airplane
through out the process. Our roles and responsibilities may change, evolve
and emerge, but throughout the design research process, we will be able to
look at old models in new ways and combine them and re-combine them
to enhance mathematics education.
Taking a design research approach allows teacher educators the oppor-
tunity to develop approaches to teacher education that are situated in the
professional lives of the teachers they work with. This creates a dynamic
process that allows for immediate changes through a process of cycles
of iteration. But most importantly, the success of using a design research
approach lies in the creativity of the teacher educator and her or his capa-
bility to combine and recombine elements drawn from research on teacher
education to design an approach that is useful and effective within the
specic context they are working.
This brings us to the article by James Hiebert, Anne Moss, and Brad
Glass in which they describe an experiment model for teaching and
teacher preparation in mathematics education. On the surface, this appears
to be similar to design research as described above, but in actuality their
approach is different in that their thinking is grounded in two goals for
mathematics teaching and the importance of creating a shared knowledge
base of teaching. For them, the difference lies in a focus on the process
of developing teaching rather than the creation of a specic product to
enhance teacher development. Nevertheless we see this as a valuable exten-
sion of the idea of a product the processes involved can become the
product that is sought. We publish this article, despite its offering the
model only in theory, to emphasize the process-as-product possibility, but
recognize that the model needs the iterations of practical implementation to
reach the deeper issues of manifesting a theoretical model in the realities
of practice. We shall be interested in reports of research that study the
implementation of this or other process-into-product models.
Jeremy Kahan, Duane Cooper and Kimberly Bethea offer a frame-
work to guide research on the relationship between mathematics teachers
knowledge of mathematical content and their teaching of mathematics.
In this framework they relate elements of teaching and the processes of
teaching in which knowledge of content is of consequence and illustrate
their use of the framework through vignettes from their own work as
educators with pre-service secondary mathematics teachers. They high-
light the complexity of investigations into the relationships involved. The
198 TERRY WOOD AND BETSY BERRY
paper from Jennifer Szydlik, Stephen Szydlik and Steven Benson explores
changes in beliefs of prospective elementary teachers about the nature of
mathematics during a pre-service mathematical content course designed
to provide participants with authentic mathematical experiences and to
foster autonomous mathematical behavior. Beliefs about the nature of
mathematical behavior were studied both at the commencement and at
the completion of the course. Students changes in beliefs were attributed
to work on big problems with underlying structures, a broadening in
the acceptable methods of solving problems, a focus on explanation and
argument, and the opportunity to generate mathematics as a classroom
community. Both of these papers take up issues of mathematics teaching
preparation linked to knowledge of mathematics as raised in the paper
from Hiebert et al. Each one offers insights into practices and their
relation to theoretical perspectives, and addresses issues relating to the
complexity of teaching and teacher education. These papers together offer
important perspectives to educators seeking to address The Teaching Gap
in mathematics teaching development (Stigler & Hiebert, 1999).
In his Reader Commentary, John Mason responds to Alan Schoenfelds
review (in JMTE 6.1) of his book Researching your own practice: The
discipline of noticing (Mason, 2002). The book, review and commentary
take up issues of how educators can work with teachers to encourage
teacher reection on and inquiry into teaching practices, aiming to enhance
teaching for effective mathematical learning. Thus, together they offer a
perspective apposite to the theme of this editorial and the papers in this
issue of JMTE.
The editors would like to draw attention to the Mason paper here as the
rst example of Reader Commentary a new style of paper welcomed
by this journal (see the inside front pages of this issue for submission
details). Here we welcome shorter and less formal papers than would be
expected in the category of Research Papers; for example, papers that
make a response to a published JMTE paper or which offer an idea or
theoretical perspective for discussion or further development. Such papers
will be reviewed as appropriate at the discretion of the editors. We should
like to use this category to encourage debate in the eld of mathematics
teaching development and teacher education.
REFERENCES
Kelly, A. (Ed.) (2003). Theme issue: The role of design in educational research. Educa-
tional Researcher, 32.
EDITORIAL 199
Lesh, R. (2002). Research design in mathematics education: Focusing on design experi-
ments. In L. English (Ed.), Handbook of international research in mathematics education
(pp. 2749). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Lewis, C. (2000, April 2000). Lesson study: The core of Japanese professional devel-
opment. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research
Association, New Orleans.
Mason, J. (2002). Researching your own practice: The discipline of noticing. London:
Routledge/Falmer.
Miller, L. D. &Hunt, N. P. (1994). Professional development through action research. In D.
B. Aichele (Ed.), Professional development for teachers of mathematics (pp. 296303).
Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Stein, M. K., Silver, E. A. & Smith, M. S. (1998). Mathematics reform and teacher devel-
opment: A community of practice perspective. In S. Goldman (Ed.), Thinking practices
in mathematics and science learning (pp. 1752). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.
Stigler, J. & Hiebert, J. (1999). The teaching gap: Best ideas from the worlds teachers for
improving education in the classroom. New York: Free Press.
Wood, T. (2002). Demand for complexity and sophistication: Generating and sharing
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