The mathematics teacher’s specialised knowledge (MTSK) model*

Abstract

This paper presents the Mathematics Teacher’s Specialised Knowledge (MTSK) model. It acknowledges earlier contributions to understanding and structuring teachers’ knowledge, in particular, the special debt owed to Shulman’s notion of pedagogical content knowledge and to Ball and collaborators’ Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (MKT), influential for the specialised nature of one of its sub-domains. The authors’ research with teachers has led them to explore the characteristics of MKT and to refine the descriptors relating to its sub-domains, a task which has underlined the difficulty involved in unambiguously delimiting the boundaries which separate these. As a result, and taking into consideration a broader view of the specialised nature of the teacher’s mathematical knowledge, the authors propose a framework which, whilst respecting the major domains of Content Knowledge and Pedagogical Content Knowledge, regards the specialisation in respect of mathematical knowledge as a property which is inherent to the model and extends across all sub-domains.