Do You Need a PhD to Teach K – 8 Mathematics in Ways Respected by the Mathematics Education Community ?

The genesis of this editorial was a conversation about an article in which Ball (1991) provided descriptions of three teachers’ approaches to working with their students. In Ball’s article, teachers without PhDs in mathematics or mathematics education struggled to engage their students in developing meaningful concepts of mathematics. They could not p r o v i d e m u l t i p l e i n t e r p r e t a t i o n s o f concepts—particularly representations that provided concrete explanations or tie-ins to the real world. They demonstrated only stepwise approaches to doing mathematics, clinging tightly to procedures and algorithms, and provided no evidence that they had a deeper understanding of the mathematics. In stark contrast, the same Ball article offered a vignette of Lampert’s teaching that illustrated a rich mathematical experience for students. Lampert provided multiple perspectives, introduced multiple representations, and demonstrated a deep understanding of both mathematics and student learning throughout the episode described. Given the number of articles in the literature painting the ‘typical’ mathematical experience as one that is impoverished, and the growing body of literature written by PhD researcher-teachers, I wondered, “Do you need a PhD to teach elementary and middle school mathematics in ways that mathematics educators would value?” After all, the Balls, Lamperts, and McClains in the literature offer high-quality mathematics instruction, attend to student thinking, provide opportunities for knowledge construction, and introduce students to a variety of tools they can use later (e.g., visual representations and problem solving strategies). Further, these researcherteachers seem to have a gift for promoting student thinking and moving an entire class forward by scaffolding lessons, questioning students, and creating a classroom community where learners consider each other’s work critically and interact meaningfully. The reality, however, is that not all mathematics teachers have PhDs and it is unlikely that most ever will. In working through this question both with the graduate students with whom I work and in preparation for this editorial, I have developed some ideas both about researcher-teachers as a “special” group and about why having a PhD might matter. Based on my thoughts I would like to propose two conjectures about researcher-teacher efforts. First, I conjecture that we should consider the way we think about researcherteachers versus research on/with teachers. Second, I propose that certain features of PhD programs can be applied to teacher professional development and/or undergraduate education to support all teachers in creating richer mathematics learning experiences for their students. This editorial explores these two conjectures in more detail.