The quality of teaching and hence teacher education is an international concern, particularly in the area of mathematics in the wake of international tests such as TIMSS and PISA. One particular issue concerns questions about how practice learning is organized, and the need to improve university-school partnerships. The research reported in this paper responds to calls for more systematic understanding of the practice learning context, following cross-national comparisons such as that conducted in Finland, England, Wales and Norway (SINTEF, 2008) and the 17-country TEDS-M (2008) report on mathematics  teacher education, which demonstrates that Norway is one of the most decentralized countries in terms of teacher education governance and practice.

The SINTEF report called for Norway to emulate and advance the UK model of collaboration between the university and the school, building on the earlier recommendations of the Norwegian NOKUT (2006) evaluation of teacher education for a more integrated relationship between theory and practice. As mathematics teacher educators in Norway, we are thus aiming to support a tripartite cooperation between teacher mentors, pre-service teachers and our university college (hereafter HiOA), with a focus on shared responsibility during in-school placement for the bridge between theory and practice.

During the first year of the programme, the overall focus is on the teacher’s role. However, students’ personal epistemologies of mathematics – what mathematics is, and how it is learned – frequently associate it with memorized facts and rules, fixed ability which cannot be acquired/improved through effort, and an emphasis on speed and teacher authority (see de Corte, Op’t Eynde & Verschaffel, 2002;Schoenfeld, 1989; Smestad et al, 2012; TEDS-M, 2008). Such beliefs are associated with ‘transmissionist’ rather than ‘connectionist’ styles of teaching (Pampaka et al, 2012).  Although the university attempts to challenge these beliefs, the impact of school placement can force a return to these earlier ideas, particularly when assessment, testing and accountability influence school systems and hence pre-service teachers’ experience in school. Nolan (2012) reports on conflict between university support for inquiry-based pedagogies and instrumentalism in practice schools as a result of pre-service teachers’ educational habitus and embedded cultural routines associated with teaching. Arvold (2005) also uses the idea of habitus to argue that pre-service teachers attend to different aspects of their teacher education programs and make sense of them differently, through the lens of their prior experience of being taught mathematics. Allen (2009) found that beginning teachers privileged what they had learned on placement rather than university theory.

This paper reports on an action research project aiming to understand and improve the relationship between theory and practice enacted by the different partners involved in school placement. We focus on the tripartite cooperation in the early stages of teacher education and our project, addressing the following research question: How do pre-service teachers and their mentors perceive the connection between what pre-service teachers are taught about mathematics education in University College and their learning from practice within the school placement?

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