Here is the abstract of their article:

What may teachers do in developing and carrying out exemplary or high-quality mathematics classroom instruction? What can we learn from teachers’ instructional practices that are often culturally valued in different education systems? In this article, we aim to highlight relevant issues that have long been interests of mathematics educators worldwide in identifying and examining teachers’ practices in high-quality mathematics classroom instruction, and outline what articles published herein can help further our understanding of such issues with cases of exemplary mathematics instruction valued in the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan.

The ability to estimate is a fundamental real-world skill; it allows students to check the reasonableness of answers found through other means, and it can help students develop a better understanding of place value, mathematical operations, and general number sense. Flexibility in the use of strategies is particularly critical in computational estimation. The ability to perform complex calculations mentally is cognitively challenging for many students; thus, it is important to have a broad repertoire of estimation strategies and to select the most appropriate strategy for a given problem. In this paper, we consider the role of students’ prior knowledge of estimation strategies in the effectiveness of interventions designed to promote strategy flexibility across two recent studies. In the first, 65 fifth graders began the study as fluent users of one strategy for computing mental estimates to multi-digit multiplication problems such as 17 × 41. In the second, 157 fifth and sixth graders began the study with moderate to low prior knowledge of strategies for computing mental estimates. Results indicated that students’ fluency with estimation strategies had an impact on which strategies they adopted. Students who exhibited high fluency at pretest were more likely to increase use of estimation strategies that led to more accurate estimates, while students with less fluency adopted strategies that were easiest to implement. Our results suggest that both the ease and accuracy of strategies as well as students’ fluency with strategies are all important factors in the development of strategy flexibility.

• EPISTEMOLOGICAL OBSTACLES IN COMING TO UNDERSTAND THE LIMIT OF A FUNCTION AT UNDERGRADUATE LEVEL: A CASE FROM THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF LESOTHO, by Eunice Kolitsoe Moru
• Talking Physics during Small-Group Work with Context-Rich Problems – Analysed from an Ownership Perspective, by Margareta Enghag, Peter Gustafsson and Gunnar Jonsson
• HISTORY AS A PLATFORM FOR DEVELOPING COLLEGE STUDENTS’ EPISTEMOLOGICAL BELIEFS OF MATHEMATICS, by Po-Hung Liu
• USING COMBINATORIAL APPROACH TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ LEARNING OF THE DISTRIBUTIVE LAW AND MULTIPLICATIVE IDENTITIES, by Yu-Ling Tsai and Ching-Kuch Chang
• The Factors Related to Preschool Children and Their Mothers on Children’s Intuitional Mathematics Abilities, by Yıldız Güven
• THE POWER OF LEARNING GOAL ORIENTATION IN PREDICTING STUDENT MATHEMATICS ACHIEVEMENT, by Chuan-Ju Lin, Pi-Hsia Hung, Su-Wei Lin, Bor-Hung Lin and Fou-Lai Lin
• K-12 Science and Mathematics Teachers’ Beliefs About and Use of Inquiry in the Classroom, by Jeff C. Marshall, Robert Horton, Brent L. Igo and Deborah M. Switzer
• Question Posing, Inquiry, and Modeling Skills of Chemistry Students in the Case-Based Computerized Laboratory Environment, by Zvia Kaberman and Yehudit Judy Dori
• Thinking Journey – a New Mode of Teaching Science, by Yaron Schur and Igal Galili

Reading the articles in this and the next Special Issue will very quickly show that social justice is difficult to define, in part because it not only depends on one’s own world view, but also it depends somewhat on the situation being analysed. Social justice is a relative concept; what is unjust to some, is not unjust to others; whether we consider something is socially unjust or relationally unjust will likewise differ.

In relation to this topic, three articles have been published online the last couple of days:

• Elizabeth de Freitas and Betina Zolkower have written an article called Using social semiotics to prepare mathematics teachers to teach for social justice.
• Raymond Brown has written an article called Teaching for social justice: exploring the development of student agency through participation in the literacy practices of a mathematics classroom.
• Amal Hussain Alajmi has written an article called Addressing computational estimation in the Kuwaiti curriculum: teachers’ views.

You can go to the links above to read more about these articles.

The authors present an analysis of portfolio entries submitted by candidates seeking certification by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards in the area of Early Adolescence/Mathematics. Analyses of mathematical features revealed that the tasks used in instruction included a range of mathematics topics but were not consistently intellectually challenging. Analyses of key pedagogical features of the lesson materials showed that tasks involved hands-on activities or real-world contexts and technology but rarely required students to provide explanations or demonstrate mathematical reasoning. The findings suggest that, even in lessons that teachers selected for display as best practice examples of teaching for understanding, innovative pedagogical approaches were not systematically used in ways that supported students’ engagement with cognitively demanding mathematical tasks.