There is strong consensus that skillful mathematics teaching depends on teachers’ knowledge of mathematics. However, what mathematics teachers need to know and how they need to know it has been the subject of much debate and research.

They will describe efforts underway at the University of Michigan to develop and assess MKT for secondary settings. In particular, practice-based activities and assessments focused on specialized content knowledge—that is, the mathematical knowledge that is deployed only when teaching. To ground the discussion, they will use a single representation of student thinking and show how it has been adapted by their team for both instruction and assessment. They will conclude by sharing an emergent framework for parsing teacher education activities with respect to the likelihood that they support teacher candidates’ development of specialized content knowledge.