Qualified Pedagogical Reflection as a Way to Improve Mathematics Education

All changes of the character of education and improvement of its quality depend, in our view, particularly on the teacher. To be able to do their work efficiently, teachers have to be equipped with professional skills and dispositions, with “teachers’ competence”. For their professional growth, we consider indispensable competence in reflection, which is aimed at the teacher’s activities with regard to aspects of pedagogy and/or subject-didactics. From the point of view of the goals and content of their teaching and the methods of work (and their realisation), the development of teachers’ conscious self-reflection on their own teaching and systematic pursuance of joint reflection with other teachers and/or researchers can promote the teacher’s professional growth. In this paper, we show how a selected group of elementary school teachers reflected on their competence in the course of preparing, carrying out and analysing several instruction experiments. The paper is based on samples of teachers’ reflections and their gradual development from mere simple conversations based on intuitive perceptions, through searching for effective teaching approaches, to the deep assessment of mathematics teaching from the point of view of topics and their didactic elaboration and to suggestions for the teachers’ own experiments.