Session Information
Contribution
Description: The paper is based on a finished first part of an ongoing development project "Educational change. How can teacher-educators and teachers cooperate in develop varied educational practice?", carried out with assistant professor Gunnar Nordberg. The development ambition is to help a group of lower-secondary practice- teachers to focus more on reflective and varied practices when teaching mathematics.
Part of the project is to observe the repertoire of methods used. The study is an open, non-participation observation using quantitative registration. The registration scheme focused both teachers and students. Both of us observed for two weeks in two different schools. While observing teachers, we also registered the pupils activities, registered the layout of the classrooms and the organization of time. Questions we asked ourselves were: It is likely to believe that teachers use different methods during the week. What will they do to motivate, to repeat, to test, etc.? Are the teachers using different methods systematically during the day, the week or in relations with certain students? We have in particularly looked for oral and written training, for exploration and exercises, for individual or group work, administration and maintaining discipline.
We believe knowledge, beliefs and attitudes, shape teachers classroom practices (Weick 1995, Cuban 1995, Argyris 1999). We also think that a main challenge for teachers is to put the curriculum, the what and why, into how (Sarv 1997, Scherp 2002). Viewed from both mathematics and pedagogy, we explore how to describe varied teaching practices in mathematics. With Dewey we think that methods and outcomes of teaching cannot be separated from the teacher's aims and subjects. However asking teachers about their goals, turned out to be more problematic than expected.
We found little intentional use of different methods during the school day. A few teachers used different methods connected to specific topics and were also conscious about the beginning and the ending of the lessons. Most of the observed teachers however focused on what to do rather than each students learning projects.
The paper will discuss some of our observations, focusing varied teaching practices and try to conceptualise the terms method, aims and subject. The scoop of the project is to explore teacher practices in relation to how methods are related to subject matters (Schön 1983, Klette 2004, Imsen 2004). How can we describe varied methods in mathematics? How can we trace the teachers thinking according to relationship between the method they use and the subject they teach?
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.