Professional practices of Mathematics teachers

This article discusses the notion of practice in order to analyze the work of the teacher in the classroom. It begins by examining two approaches for this notion, the cognitive and the socio-cultural, with special attention to the professional practices of the teachers, and identifies two key elements of such practice: the tasks and the classroom discourse. It then focuses on two practices in the teaching and learning of mathematics, the presentation of tasks to students and the collective discussions, reviewing the main features and issues and illustrating them with episodes of the grades 5 and 7 classrooms. The article ends with the presentation of elements for a model to study the professional practices of mathematics teachers.