The Future of Education

Over the last decades, videotaping has been widely accepted to be a useful tool for teachers’ professional development-(PD)(Sherin, 2004; Santagata and Guarino 2011). Compared with analyzing other teachers' videos, teachers who analyzed their own teaching experienced higher activation, manifested by higher immersion, resonance, and motivation. In addition, they became more aware of relevant components of teaching and learning (Seidel et al., 2011). In this study, we adopted Mason’s framework (1998) for such levels, developed for mathematics teachers. This led us to develop a program The Video-Based Didactic discourse-(VBD discourse) whose aim is to provide mathematics and physics teachers with professional development. The mathematics education researchers’ community has become interested in characterizing the required knowledge for mathematics teaching. Relying on Shulman’s (1986) work, Ball & Bass (2003) defined the term “Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching"-(MKT) as knowledge that crosses areas and levels of school mathematics, supports connected ideas, and emphasizes the ability to plan, integrate and manage appropriate mathematical content for teaching. Following this work, Ball, Thames & Phelps (2008), presented six different components of MKT. Two of them are particularly relevant to this study: Specialized Content Knowledge-(SCK) and Knowledge of Content and Students-(KCS). The purpose of our research was to examine how the VBD discourse contributes to the development of five pre-service teachers’ MKT, during their participation in a Didactics of mathematics course at the Academic College of Education. An analysis of the findings indicates that the VBD discourse based on their video mathematics teaching raised their awareness, and contributed to the development of their SCK and KCS.

Keywords: Discourse,  Professional development, Mathematics education;

References:
[1] Ball, D. L., & Bass, H. (2003). Toward a practice-based theory of mathematical knowledge for teaching. In: B. Davis & E. Simmt (Eds), Proceedings of the 2002 annual meeting of the Canadian Mathematics Education Study Group, pp. 3–14. Edmonton, AB: CMESG/GCEDM
[2] Ball, D. L., Thames, M. H. & Phelps, G. (2008) Content knowledge for teaching: what makes it special? Journal of Teacher Education 59(5), 389–407.
[3] Mason, J. (1998). Enabling teachers to be real teachers: Necessary levels of awareness and structure of attention. Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 1(3), 243-267.
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