The presented teacher education project is part of a four years long intervention project where we collaborate with teachers in two primary schools to create a successful learning culture in early learning of mathematics with special emphasis on language development. In this study we follow a group of student teachers in their third year of initial teacher education programme having their field practice with one of the collaborating teachers. This presentation is on preliminary findings from a study of student teachers’ mathematical dialogues with third graders, with the aim of supporting the pupils’ mathematical reasoning. The research question in this presentation is: How can video recordings facilitate identification of qualities and challenges in student teachers’ mathematical dialogues with pupils?

Research shows that mathematical reasoning is important for children’s later achievement in mathematics (Nunes, Bryant, Sylva & Barros, 2009). Differences in pupils’ mathematical thinking and reasoning could be attributed to the type of questions that teachers ask (Kazemi & Stipek, 2001). However, questions posed within mathematics classrooms across the world fail to provide students with opportunities to reason about mathematical concepts or to explore mathematical connections (Hiebert et al., 2003). Asking questions that probe pupils’ thinking is a complex skill that requires thoughtful planning, as well as analysis of the mathematical and pedagogical goal of the lesson (Manouchehri & Lapp, 2003). According to Henning and Lockhart (2003) prospective teachers pose questions quickly with few follow-ups, giving little time for the pupils to expand their answers. Thus, developing questioning skills for mathematical understanding and content knowledge is an important part of learning to teach mathematics.

As with questioning, learning how to listen to and interpret pupils’ mathematical ideas is not a simple task (Chamberlin, 2005). As a consequence, researchers contend that developing the capacity of professional noticing must be an early focus of teacher education programs (Sherin & van Es, 2005; Star & Strickland, 2008). Jacobs et al. (2010) define and conceptualize professional noticing as a set of three interrelated skills: Attending to children’s strategies, interpreting children’s understandings, and deciding how to respond on the basis of children’s understandings (p. 172). Work with practicing teachers in the context of video-clubs show that the teachers improved noticing over multiple experiences discussing video from their own teaching. Moreover, conversations about what the participant teachers noticed shifted from a focus on what the teacher was doing to what the pupils were saying (Sherin & van Es, 2005). Videotaping seem to help teachers examine their ability to facilitate discussions by slowing down the fast pace of classroom life so that explicit noticing of particular aspects of the discussion can be further analyzed. In this sense, video coaching, the use of taped activities of the student teachers’ own teaching, which leads to group discussions, can play an important role in field practice (Masats & Dooly, 2011). 

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