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Submitted on 7 Jan 2020
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How to improve teacher students’ awareness of critical aspects in a lesson plan
Jonas Dahl, Anna Wernberg, Cecilia Winström
To cite this version:
Jonas Dahl, Anna Wernberg, Cecilia Winström. How to improve teacher students’ awareness of critical aspects in a lesson plan. Eleventh Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education, Utrecht University, Feb 2019, Utrecht, Netherlands. �hal-02430055�
How to improve teacher students’ awareness of critical aspects in a lesson plan
Jonas Dahl, Anna Wernberg and Cecilia Winström
Malmö University, Faculty of Education, Sweden; Jonas.dahl@mau.se, anna.wernberg@mau.se, Cecilia.winstrom@mau.se
Keywords: Learning study, mathematical knowledge for teaching, theory of variation, critical aspects.
Introduction
In this poster we will present a learning study conducted by three Swedish teacher educators. The aim of the learning study was to identify critical features concerning the teaching and learning of Mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT). Two classes of teacher students and 30 lesson plans were analysed using the theory of variation.
Teacher student’s theoretical knowledge of learning and teaching mathematic is crucial for their teaching practice. In previous courses we have discerned how teacher students on one hand can describe different strategies for solving a problem and on the other hand describe common misconceptions pupils have in elementary mathematics. Nevertheless, they do not comprehend the relationship between them. To address the problem, we have conducted a learning study focusing on the theoretical framework Mathematical Knowledge for Education (MKT), prepared by Ball, Thames and Phelps (2008), to describe the knowledge required to teach mathematics (Figure 1).
The work was also guided by prior research (Bommel, 2012).
Figure 1: Domains of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching
Method
Learning study offers a potential platform for teachers to collaboratively explore their own practice in order to generate and share knowledge about teaching and students learning. The first learning study was carried out in Hong Kong in 1999. By now over 300 learning studies have been developed in Hong Kong and it has been developed in other parts of the world, including Sweden.
Lo and Marton (2012) stress that,
learning study has been found to improve students learning, reduce the gap between the high and low achievers and contributed to teachers’ professional development and the learning of researchers (p. 9).
A learning study is an iterative process where a small group of teachers handle a particular pedagogical content. The students’ way of making sense of the pedagogical content, initially and after a lesson is systematically scrutinized and revised once or twice and carried out in a different class. The whole process is well documented. The variation theory (Marton & Lo, 2012) is used as a theoretical tool for planning the lessons as well as analysing the lesson and the teacher students’
lesson plans.
Data collection
The data collected consists of lesson plans (written test) and two video recordings of iterative seminars given in the teacher education course. The mathematical topic covered was probability.
Prior to, and after each seminar, the teacher students handed in a lesson plan.
Preliminary results
The analysis of the lesson plans revealed how and what the student teachers understood or not and thus what critical features the seminar should focus on. We could see in the lesson plan that the students wrote an aim with the lesson, a didactic plan for the lesson an also how they would evaluate the pupils learning. What was missing was the connection between the three (critical aspect). In the seminar we let student teachers look at a lesson plan conducted by someone else than the students as well as questions about the alignment between aim, lesson and evaluation in order for them to discern the critical aspects. The result showed that the students had not discerned the critical aspects and one reason could be the lack of contrast between different lesson plans since we only addressed one lesson plan in the seminar. For the second seminar we discussed one lesson plan in whole class and addressed questions about what was missing in the lesson plan between the linking in the alignment. In order for the teacher students to discern the critical aspects they got a lesson plan to compare and contrast with the first one discussed. One critical aspect we overlooked was the student’s ability to make the lesson plan concrete enough to work in a classroom. A second learning study will be conducted taking into account the need to variate concrete lesson plans.
References
Ball, D. L. Thames, M. H., & Phelps, G. (2008). Content knowledge for teaching: What makes it special? Journal of Teacher Education, 59(5), 389–407.
Bommel, J. van (2012). Improving teaching, improving learning, improving as a teacher:
mathematical knowledge for teaching as an object of learning (Ph. D. thesis). Department of Mathematics, Karlstad University.
Lo, M. L., & Marton, F. (2012). Towards a science of the art of teaching – Using variation theory as a guiding principle of pedagogical design. International Journal of Lesson and Learning Studies, 1(1), 7–22.
