Responses to “The Scary Question”: how teaching challenges impact the use of knowledge and its development

This paper reports on teachers’ experiences of being out of their comfort zone in their mathematics teaching. We describe examples of experiences that the teachers considered “scary”, their reported responses to those situations, and the longer-term effects of such experiences. Implications for the acquisition of knowledge for teaching mathematics are discussed, and questions raised about the possible impacts of confidence and experience on the interaction between discomforting experiences and teacher learning.