In a previous study of 2 schools in England that taught mathematics very differently, the first author found that a project-based mathematics approach resulted in higher achievement, greater understanding, and more appreciation of mathematics than a traditional approach. In this follow-up study, the first author contacted and interviewed a group of adults 8 years after they had left the 2 schools to investigate their knowledge use in life. This showed that the young adults who had experienced the 2 mathematics teaching approaches developed profoundly different relationships with mathematics knowledge that contributed towards the shaping of different identities as learners and users of mathematics (Boaler & Greeno, 2000). The adults from the project-based school had also moved into significantly more professional jobs, despite living in one of the lowest income areas of the country. In this article, we consider the different opportunities that the 2 school approaches offered for longterm relationships with mathematics and different forms of mathematical expertise that are differentially useful in the 21st century (Hatano & Oura, 2003).

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Mathematics discussions are important for helping students to develop conceptual understanding and to learn disciplinary norms and practices. In recent years, there has been increased attention to teaching prospective teachers to lead discussions with students. This paper examines the possibilities of designing a formative assessment that gathers information about prospective elementary teachers’ skills with leading problem-based mathematics discussions and makes sense of such information. A decomposition of the practice of leading discussions was developed and used to design the assessment. Nine first-year teachers who graduated from a range of different teacher education programs participated in the study. The findings reveal that our formative assessment works to gather information about teachers’ capabilities with leading discussions and that the associated tools support making sense of the information gathered. This suggests that such tools could be useful to support the formative assessment of the developing capabilities of prospective teachers.

To learn mathematical practices, students need opportunities to engage in them. But simply providing such opportunities may not be sufficient to support all students. Simultaneously, explicitly teaching mathematical practices could be problematic if instruction becomes prescriptive. This study investigated how teachers might make mathematical practices explicit in classroom discourse. Analyses of 26 discussions from 3 mathematics classes revealed that teachers made mathematical practices explicit primarily after students had participated in them. I present a framework of 8 types of teacher moves that made mathematical practices explicit and argue that they did so without turning practices into prescriptions or reducing students' opportunities to engage in them. This suggests a need to expand conceptions of explicitness to promote access to mathematical practices.