Commentary on Section 2: Attending to Teachers in Mathematics Teacher Education Research

The four chapters in this section report on studies of teacher beliefs, identity, knowledge, and/or learning. Individually and collectively, these chapters make clear the central role that teachers play in shaping student learning. In this chapter, I identify implications of these studies for teacher education, including the need for teacher educators to embrace reality, facilitate discourse, abandon deficit models of teachers, and recognize multiplicity. I also describe the lessons these studies offer for future research with teachers, including the need to borrow research methods from other disciplines, listen to teachers, avoid deficit language, and build on prior research.