Rui Ding

Purpose: This reflective self-study examines how multi-dimensional interactions within an interdisciplinary lesson study on “Time” contributed to my professional growth as a novice mathematics teacher. It focuses on the interaction patterns that supported changes in my instructional beliefs, design practices, and professional understanding. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on a reflective narrative self-study embedded in iterative lesson study (LS) cycles, I documented and analyzed my experiences in a project initiated during my master's program. Data sources included iterative versions of lesson plans, classroom video recordings, reflective journals, post-lesson discussion transcripts, and student work samples. The analysis combined thematic narrative analysis and inductive coding to identify and compare recurrent “trigger–response” interaction patterns across different kinds of interactions. Cross-material triangulation was used to enhance the credibility of the findings. Findings: Across two LS cycles, five recurring patterns of interaction were identified: supervisory guidance, engagement with curricular texts, cross-disciplinary collaboration in co-constructing integrated lesson designs, responsive exchanges with students, and systematic self-reflection. These patterns appeared in my design, enactment, and assessment decisions. Together, they marked a shift in my professional role – from implementing isolated subject-based lessons to designing interconnected learning experiences – and repositioned my instructional stance from delivering content to facilitating disciplinary understanding through interdisciplinary inquiry. Originality/value: This study offers a first-person, longitudinal account of professional growth in a Chinese elementary mathematics context. It shows how intentionally structured, multi-dimensional interactions within lesson study can accelerate teachers' development, particularly under the current policy demands for interdisciplinary thematic learning.

In the wave of global mathematics curriculum reforms initiated in the new millennium, fostering 21st-century skills has emerged as a key educational objective in both Mainland China and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), China. Correspondingly, these societies in China have revised their mathematics curricula to reflect this paradigm shift. This scoping review examines trends and innovations in mathematics teaching methodologies over the past two decades within these locales. We analysed peer-reviewed journal articles published from 2000 to 2022 that focus on mathematics education in Mainland China and Hong Kong SAR. Our findings highlight a variety of reform-oriented pedagogical approaches adopted in each region, including inquiry-based learning, flipped classroom, problem-based learning, and technology-enhanced learning. We discuss the similarities and differences, as well as the controversies and challenges associated with these methods. Additionally, the review considers the adaptation of mathematics pedagogy to address new challenges and demands in the context of recent educational reform. The insights gleaned offer a deeper understanding of innovative mathematics pedagogies and inform the implementation of new curricula and teaching strategies in these two regions. Furthermore, our research may serve as a valuable reference for mathematics curriculum reform and the advancement of effective mathematics instruction elsewhere.

We address the question: What may be the conceptual sources of Chinese elementary students’ correct and incorrect solutions to multiplicative problem situations? We focus on situations for eliciting evidence about their ability to add and subtract sets of composite units—mental structures that underlie conceiving of whole numbers as a single entity composed of smaller units (e.g., “3” is composed of three “1s”). A conception postulated to underlie this ability is termed Same-Unit Coordination (SUC). We attribute student errors to reasonable-to-them spontaneous use of a previously established, repetitively practiced way of operating on 1s (“Ones”) contained within composite units—a conception we term Totaling. We analyze qualitative data to illuminate this phenomenon and quantitative data to depict its scope. These analyses support our claim that student solutions, seen by an observer as correct or erroneous, can be explained as (a) reasonable from the students’ frame of reference and (b) possibly arising from instructional focus on mastering multiplication facts to find totals of 1s in equal-size sets.