The Project
Funded by the European Union, the Mathematics Education Traditions of Europe
(METE) project examined aspects of mathematics teaching in Belgium (Flanders),
England, Finland, Hungary and Spain. The main dataset comprised video recordings
of four sequences of lessons taught in each country on agreed topics by teachers
defined locally, in the manner of the learner’s perspective study (Clarke, 2006) as
effective. After recording, videotapes were downloaded and compressed for ease of
sharing and coded against a generic schedule developed in a bottom-up and iterative
manner during the first year of the project. Full details of this process can be
seen in Andrews (2007c), although it is probably sufficient to say that the final coding
schedule comprised seven generic learning outcomes and ten generic didactic
strategies which project colleagues thought, on the basis of a year’s live observations,
reflected well their perceptions of the mathematics teaching of the five
countries.3 Codes were applied to the episodes of a lesson, where an episode was
defined “as that part of a lesson in which the teacher’s observable didactic intention
remained constant” (Andrews, 2007c, p. 499), with no limit to the number
of codes that could be applied. The only criterion was the presence of a learning