Teaching can have a substantial impact on student learning (Darling-Hammond, 1999). However, teaching excellence depends on many factors, including the need for high quality teachers and their continued education, and high quality materials (Cohen, Raudenbush, & Ball, 2002; Putnam & Borko, 2000). This learning includes learning to plan and enact lessons that are appropriate for all students, which requires learning to interpret and understand student thinking and learning instructional routines and practices that will enable them to use student thinking productively. As we enter into the era of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics this learning is even more critical, as the standards may require teachers to not only learn to understand and unpack the standards themselves, but may also require teachers to learn new content and learn to teach in different ways (Lappan, McCallum, Kepner, 2010).Due to the complex nature of teaching and the myriad of demands placed on teachers, mathematics educators need to consider all possible venues for teacher learning. In this paper, I discuss my examination of the opportunities for teacher learning embedded within written curriculum materials. Research indicates that teachers can and do learn from curriculum materials. Curriculum materials, particularly educative ones, emerge as a potential source for opportunities for teacher learning in ways that set them apart from more traditional professional development, which is often criticized for being decontextualized, contrived, short-term, fragmented, discontinuous, and disconnected (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Little, 1994; Lord, 1994; Wilson & Berne, 1999). Educative curriculum materials are materials for Grades K-12 that are "intended to promote teacher learning in addition to students' " (Davis & Krajcik, 2005, p. 3). I investigated the opportunities to learn embedded in four middle school curricular series in the areas on introduction to variables and geometric transformations, by examining the content and its expression in the teachers' guides. I developed and used two analytical framework; one to code the content support derived from work in science education (Beyer et al., 2009) and a second framework to describe the expression of text, or the aspects of voice developed by Morgan (1996) and augmented by Herbel-Esienmann (2007). My results indicated that all four curricular series included opportunities for teacher learning (mostly related to Pedagogical Content Support for Practices and Curricular Knowledge, depending on the curriculum) in both the variable and the transformations units, but these opportunities were quite minimal and focused heavily on particular types of supports, such as Implementation Guidance for Using Question. This lack of support was particularly true for Rationale Guidance for teachers. In addition to the content support, my analysis of aspects of voice indicated that while these four series provided opportunities for teacher learning, they also may hinder teachers' learning by speaking "through" teachers rather than "to" teachers (Remillard, 2000), as evidenced by the ways in which personal pronouns were used and the frequencies of imperatives and modal verbs. I discuss implications for curriculum development, teacher education, and research.
Read
