In recent years, elementary school preservice teachers often have a fieldwork experience before student teaching. However, the quality of these experiences varies greatly (Wilson, Floden, and Ferrini-Mundy 2002). What supports a good fieldwork experience? Certainly we want students to be taught in classrooms in which they are asked to reason, represent, and communicate. At the University of Michigan–Dearborn, we strive to find these sorts of placements—first, by working with districts using reform-based materials and, second, by asking local district leaders to identify exemplary teachers. Moreover, our future teachers have experienced inquiry-based lessons in the mathematics and science courses they take as university students. Even with this careful design, when we observe classrooms in the field we find that future teachers focus on surface aspects rather than on mathematical thinking. This experience concurs with the findings of Moore (2003) and Putnam and Borko (2000), who found that novices focus on management and procedures, not on learning. So we asked ourselves, How do we sharpen the future teachers' focus?
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