Competent students, competent teachers?

In an attempt to investigate East Asian teachers’ competence in mathematics, a small-scale exploratory study conducted in Hong Kong and Korea replicating Maʹs study (Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics, Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 1999) is reported in this chapter. It was found that although Hong Kong and Korean teachers possessed conceptual as well as procedural understanding of mathematics, the majority of their reported teaching strategies were procedurally rather than conceptually directed. Compared with their Shanghai counterparts in Maʹs study, they lacked a profound understanding of mathematics, they had not organized their mathematics understanding into an explicit knowledge package which they could talk about readily, and they were weak in strategies for exploring mathematics.