Developing pedagogic approaches for proof: learning from teaching in the East and West

In our work we focus on learning from the teaching of proof in geometry at the lower secondary school level across countries in the East and in the West. In this paper we summarize selected findings from a series of classroom-based experiments carried out over an extended period of time. By extracting key findings from our research, we show how we are identifying good models of pedagogy and using these to develop new pedagogic principles that are intended to help secondary school students not only to know ‘how to proceed’ with deductive proof, but also to understand more fully why such formal proof is necessary to verify mathematical statements