Creating Preservice Knowledge by Collaborating to Improve Teaching

• In Event: Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: Teachers and Teaching: Why the Distinction Is Important and What It Might Mean for Mathematics Education Research

Abstract

This paper reports on the results of an effort to engage pre-service secondary mathematics teachers in revising and improving lesson plans in the context of a paired practicum placement. Based on the premise that teachers have to continue to learn from their teaching throughout their career (Hiebert, Morris, Berk, & Jansen, 2007), the study participants completed a teaching assignment in which partners collaboratively created and revised a lesson plan. The partners, with the support of their university-based supervisor, engaged in a cycle of teaching, revising, and re-teaching. This assignment was designed to focus the preservice teachers’ attention on improving lesson plans with the larger goal of preparing them to approach lesson planning as a way to study and improve teaching thoughout their careers. This paper describes two cases of this assignment in which two pairs of PSTs engaged in this reflective teaching cycle for the same lesson. The data was collected in the fall of 2012, and consisted of field notes taken from four lesson observations and four planning and reflection meetings, as well as written reflections handed in by participants, and examples of student work collected during the lessons. Analysis of the field notes revealed that through engaging in a systematic examination of their own teaching, pre-service teachers were able to clarify and improve learning goals, enact increasingly sophisticated teaching techniques, and provide more effective opportunities for student learning. For example, one of the pairs hypothesized, after reflecting on the first iteration of the lesson, that the instructor may have limited students’ opportunities to learn with a problem by stating many of the important mathematical relationships himself. They revised the lesson plan to allow for more student involvement in naming and describing these relationships. Over the course of the two cases the co-constructed lesson plan was consistently and incrementally improved over the four incarnations of this lesson. By the final teaching episode, the pre-service teacher enacting the plan was able to manage logistics, anticipate and forestall unproductive student confusion, manage small group and large group discourse in ways that focused attention on important mathematics, and situate important vocabulary as a tool to facilitate student discourse. This study is an example of an effort to improve teaching through the improvement of lesson plans, a practice advocated by scholars who argue that such efforts to improve teaching could lead to incremental, but widespread improvements in student learning (Hiebert, Gallimore, & Stigler, 2002; Stigler & Hiebert, 1999). However, there is evidence to indicate that this activity also resulted in growth for individual teacher candidates, including increased mathematical knowledge for teaching, pedagogical knowledge, and an increased emphasis on professional learning as opposed to performance as an indicator of ability.

Author

• Robert Morgan Wieman, Rowan University