MathTASK: Designing and implementing situation specific activities for mathematics teacher education and professional development

MathTASK is a research and development programme that engages mathematics teachers with challenging and highly contextualised classroom situations in the form of tasks (mathtasks). Teacher responses to these tasks reveal their mathematical and pedagogical discourses and provide opportunities to articulate, reflect and shift said discourses. These tasks have been used as instruments for research as well as teacher education and professional development in the UK, Greece and Brazil. In this overview presentation of the MathTASK programme , we first introduce the MathTASK programme and its principles- and we exemplify these principles with one mathtask (simplification task). We then present a summary of theoretical constructs that have emerged in the course of analysis of MathTASK data before concluding with observations on the benefits of using mathtasks as a means to trigger and facilitate mathematics teachers’ reflection on their practice.