Educating Mathematics Teachers

In our current teacher education programmes, teachers are being prepared in ways that develop "procedural knowledge of mathematics" which assumes that the teacher is the possessor of ready made mathematical knowledge o be conveyed to the student. On the other hand, "conceptual knowledge of mathematics" challenges the assumption that teachers transmit knowledge to students and argues that teacher's conceptualizations can not be given directly to the learner and that conceptual understanding in mathematics must be constructed by the learner. As a result, much of the constructivist educators in the last decade attempted to provide teachers with ways to organize learning environments, manage instruction, and teach conceptually rather than procedurally and investigated the question of what teachers need to know to teach conceptually, where and how teachers can best acquire and develop that knowledge.
This paper addresses each of these questions for Turkish mathematics education and considers some viewpoints which mentioned in the literature. The first section of the paper starts by explaining what is meant by the term "conceptual knowledge of mathematics" which will be used throughout the paper. The second section deals with the current pattern of teacher education and problems in training secondary school mathematics teachers. In the last section, some possible solutions for the shortcomings of the Turkish mathematics education are discussed from a constructive perspective.
Finally, the paper will have implications that the effort of teacher education programmes in mathematics should center on a view that the teacher is to enable students to be actively involved in the process of doing mathematics. In particular, teacher's knowledge of mathematics should be promoted and evaluated in terms of mathematics values and concepts not specific skills and symbol manipulations.