Lesson Study and Preservice Teachers

• In Event: Lesson Study Variation Across Contexts

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges that teacher candidates face is designing quality tasks/lessons that will engage K-12 students in doing inquiry-based mathematics, let alone enacting the task/lesson effectively in a classroom. Pre-service secondary teachers in a mathematics methods course engaged in a semester-long modified lesson-study activity that produced a lesson for students in the second of two content courses for pre-service elementary teachers. The lesson was delivered by a university faculty member, and recorded to allow the designing students to observe successful and problematic areas of the lesson, as well as to note any modifications made, on-the-fly, but the delivering instructor. In this form, teacher candidates were able to solely focus on the design of the task initially, but then started reflecting on the enactment of the lesson. The expectations of the university faculty and the reflections of the pre-service student participants will be shared and contrasted.

Author

• S. Asli Ozgun-Koca, Wayne State University