Preparing the Effective Elementary Mathematics Teacher

With funding from the National Science Foundation Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship program, Montclair State University, in collaboration with The County College of Morris, will prepare undergraduate mathematics majors to become Kindergarten thru 6th grade elementary mathematics teachers through its Preparing the Effective Elementary Mathematics Teacher (PE2MT) project. The project will fund 30 scholarships to mathematics majors over five years. The experience of teacher candidates in the PE2MT Scholarship Program will be enhanced by academic support for advanced content courses, enriched methods and specialized content courses, early and ongoing community-oriented field experiences, undergraduate research experience, prolonged in-service induction support, and seminars that cultivate community and connect all components of the program.

The PE2MT Scholarship Program will produce 30 new elementary mathematics teachers who are well prepared to teach in high-need schools in New Jersey. These teachers will have graduated from a uniquely enhanced degree program that engages them in a range of pedagogically, psychologically, and epistemologically transforming professional development experiences in addition to their mathematics and education coursework requirements. The program goals are to: recruit high-quality pre-service elementary teachers for effective mathematics teaching, prepare high-quality pre-service elementary teachers for a career of effective mathematics teaching in a high-need school, and promote the retention of high-quality elementary math teachers in high-need schools. Accordingly, this project broadens participation to under-represented groups in mathematics by recruiting new elementary mathematics teachers to the profession, providing them with extraordinary preparation experiences, and placing them in the schools where they are needed most. In addition, the PE2MT project will undertake research that aims to better understand pre-service mathematics teacher preparation at the elementary level by investigating the potential contributions of bachelors-level mathematical knowledge to elementary mathematics teaching and how these pre-service teachers' cultural, community, and pedagogical content knowledge develop as they learn to teach mathematics for the diversity of elementary classrooms.