No abstract

Recent reforms in mathematics education have increased the need for teachers to attend professional development programs. In order to motivate teachers to attend such programs and to maximize their effect on teachers' development, we believe it is important to adapt the contents of such programs to teachers' perceived needs. The current study was designed to explore the professional needs of Israeli mathematics teachers, as they perceived them. Our results show that teachers are mainly concerned with developing their mathematical knowledge and acquiring knowledge that relates to the way in which students comprehend various mathematical concepts. However, these concerns stem from different positions that can be attributed to their teaching experience: new teachers appear to be self-centered; therefore their concern with developing their knowledge might be a result of a need to gain self-confidence. More experienced teachers are able to consider the effect of their teaching on students' learning, and it appears that their wish to acquire knowledge stems from this perspective. Highly experienced teachers, like new teachers, are also self-centered, believing they know everything about teaching and learning, and therefore express interest in acquiring knowledge merely for satisfying their own curiosity.

This paper describes the experience of a group of 17 prospective mathematics teachers who were engaged in a series of activities aimed at developing their awareness of creativity in mathematics. This experience was initiated on the basis of ideas proposed by the participants regarding ways creativity of school students might be developed. Over a period of 6 weeks, they were engaged in inventing geometrical concepts and in the examination of their properties. The prospective teachers' reflections upon the process they underwent indicate that they developed awareness of various aspects of creativity while deepening their mathematical and didactical knowledge.

No abstract

In a changing technological society, creativity is recognized as the vehicle of economic and social growth. Although the education system has a central role in developing all students' creativity, it is not often nurtured in schools. Several conditions are offered to justify this situation, among them: external pressures to cover the curriculum and succeed in standardized tests that generally require rote implementation of rules and algorithmic thinking; teachers' tendency to teach similarly to the way they themselves were taught as school students; relating creativity to giftedness, and therefore avoiding nurturing all students' creativity; teachers' difficulties in assessing their students' creativity and its development due to a lack of an available simple tool; and more. This paper is aimed at responding to the latter condition, suggesting a coherent and accessible tool or model for assessing students' creativity and its development in the context of problem posing. The proposed model considers 4 measurable aspects of creativity-fluency, flexibility, originality and organization, and a total score of creativity that is based on relative weights of each aspect. Viewing creativity as relative, the scores for these 4 aspects reflect learner's achievements in relation to his or her reference group. The proposed model has two flexible components-the first relates to teachers' interpretation of originality, and the second relates to the weights they may wish to ascribe each aspect of creativity. In addition, it is suggested to provide learners with a graphical display of their scores and progress in order to enable them to refine their products in successive iterations. The examples in this paper are taken from mathematics; however the proposed model can be adapted to any other discipline.