Strengthening Mathematics Teachers’ Subject Matter Knowledge for Teaching Critical Thinking through the SUPER-LS

Teaching critical thinking in the mathematics classroom is essential yet challenging. Mathematics teachers need a strong foundation of subject matter knowledge (SMK) to be able to design and conduct a mathematics lesson that focuses on critical thinking. However, this knowledge was found to be limited among the teachers. One of the collaborative learning platforms that can be used to facilitate teacher to strengthen their SMK is a school-university partnership mediated by the lesson study (SUPER-LS) program. Thus, this study aims to strengthen mathematics teachers’ SMK for teaching critical thinking through the SUPER-LS program. The qualitative case study design with embedded units was used in this study, involving 10 in-service teachers (ISTs) and 59 students. Lesson study artefacts were employed to collect data and analyzed using transcript-based lesson analysis and performance assessment of the critical thinking scale. The study discovered that the SUPER-LS program fostered collaboration among ISTs, leading to improvement of SMK, with specialized content knowledge (SCK) emerging as the most dominant component. In addition, students’ proficiency in each indicator of critical thinking ranged from level 1 to level 4, with most students at level 2. The findings call on education stakeholders to sustain the SUPER-LS program to improve students' critical thinking performance.