Conclusion
We conducted this study to contribute to an emerging body of literature in mathematics
education on video- and practice-based teacher preparation. Specifically, we investigated
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the potential of video- and practice-based teacher preparation for the development of PSTs’
abilities to teach in ways that makes student thinking visible and to use evidence of student
thinking to assess the effectiveness of teaching. In addition, we have explored the relationship
between these two skills.
Overall, we believe that this study provides promising evidence of the kind of learning
that video- and practice-based teacher preparation might create for future teachers. PSTs in
our project not only improved in their analyses of teaching performed by others (Santagata
and Guarino 2011), but also learned to analyze their own teaching and to teach in ways that
make analysis, particularly of student thinking, possible. The effects on teaching practices
are particularly noteworthy given the overall limited teaching experience of our participants
and the fact that changing teaching (from teacher-centered approaches common in
US classrooms to student-centered approaches) is not easy (Santagata and Barbieri 2005).
PSTs in the LLMT course often lamented the fact that they had never experienced as
students the kind of teaching we were promoting. Analyses of their group conversations
around video-based tasks during the course revealed their need to discuss the features of
this ‘‘new’’ approach to teaching and contrast them to a more traditional approach in order
to appropriate it (Jovel et al. 2011). This highlights for us the affordances of video-based
discussions in teacher preparation, particularly when, as we did in the LLMT course, PSTs
are exposed to images of teaching that build on student thinking and are encouraged to use
evidence-based reasoning to assess its effectiveness.
PSTs who participated in the LLMT course were also able to transfer skills they learned
in a university course to their classroom teaching and to the analysis of their own teaching.
These are not trivial outcomes. As discussed in the introduction, because of the brevity of
teacher preparation programs, it is important to place PSTs on the right trajectory to
continue to learn from their practices overtime. We believe that PSTs like Claudia, who
enter the teaching career with the ability both to teach in ways that make student thinking
accessible and to analyze their teaching effectiveness by identifying strategies that support
and do not support student learning, will be able to continue to grow professionally once
they have left their teacher preparation program. We think that the enactment activities of
the LLMT course enabled PSTs to implement in their classrooms strategies they had
observed through video and to transfer their analysis skills from the analysis of the
teaching of others to their own. Specifically, role-playing activities and planning, teaching,
and analysis assignments of increasing difficulty provided opportunities for PSTs to
practice these skills with the necessary support and feedback to be able to implement them
more independently later in the PACT-TE lessons.
Although limited in scope by the small number of participants, this study also suggests
that the ability to focus on students during both teaching and analysis is not something PST
teachers can develop by simply completing fieldwork experiences (as evidenced by the
outcomes of non-LLMT participants). Structured opportunities for developing these abilities
in systematic ways need to be embedded in teacher preparation programs.
Finally, although we were overall pleased with the results of our analyses, the findings
also suggest that the video-based curriculum could be improved to facilitate the learning
process of all participants. Specific activities could be designed to create opportunities for
PSTs to further practice questioning strategies that make student thinking visible during
teaching. Other activities could be designed to assist PSTs in identifying evidence of
student learning or difficulties that is relevant to the lesson’s learning goals and to disregard
evidence that is too general or not central to the lesson. This study thus serves as the
basis for future investigations, already underway, that will include larger samples, will
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