Planning, teaching and reflecting on how to explain inverse rational numbers: The case of Ana

To promote understanding of rational numbers is challenging to teachers and prospective teachers, and this led us to study the planning, teaching, and reflection processes of prospective teachers (grades 5-6) on that topic. The aim of the paper is to analyse how Ana, a prospective teacher, prepared, developed, and reflected about communication, with special focus on instructional explanations and on mathematics ideas about the unit on multiplication of fractions. Ana prepared and developed different explanations to reach pupils’ ideas. We discuss the nature of her didactic knowledge as she seeks to promote pupils’ understanding of the multiplication of inverse rational numbers.