Comparing Two Frameworks for Exploring the Quality of Mathematics Teaching in a Malawian Primary Classroom

Over the years, several frameworks and lesson observation protocols have been developed to ensure objectivity and consistency when determining the quality of a mathematics lesson. Frequently, the frameworks do not agree on the benchmarks for assessing and describing the quality of a lesson. This puts mathematics education researchers in a dilemma when deciding the appropriate framework for analysing mathematics lessons. Instead of treating the frameworks as mutually exclusive, we are of the view that each framework has some unique aspects that contribute to the story about the quality of a mathematics lesson. In this paper, we examine how the Mathematical Quality of Instruction framework and the Mediating Primary Mathematics framework, as lenses, help us to see and describe various aspects of instructional quality from one episode of a mathematics lesson in Malawi. We notice that the two frameworks share some common criteria for describing the quality of a mathematics lesson, such as the focus on making mathematical connections and using multiple representations, but they also differ on other areas of emphasis, such as the use of artefacts in the Mediating Primary Mathematics framework, and the emphasis on errors in the Mathematical Quality of Instruction framework. As such, we conclude that both frameworks can be useful for discussing the quality of a lesson in a professional development setup.