Learning Obstacles in the Making of Lesson Plans by Prospective Mathematics Teacher Students

Abstract

Prospective mathematics teachers’ students must be able to build didactic situations that encourage students to actively learn. They must also be able to develop lesson plans independently. The facts found include lesson plans in the form of drill activities and the activity of downloading lesson plans from the Internet rather than compiling the lesson plans themselves, which are problems that need to be resolved. This study aims to analyse the learning obstacles experienced by prospective mathematics teacher students in preparing lesson plans. This research was a qualitative didactic design research with a focus on the analysis of didactic and metadidactic situations. The research subjects were three easily accessible prospective teachers, lecture administrators, lecturers from certain courses, and program administrators. Lecturers were chosen through the snowball method. The analysis of prospective teachers learning obstacles was conducted by analysing their actions, formulations, and validations during courses on curriculum analysis, media, and microteaching. The results showed that there were (1) ontogenic obstacles, namely, the readiness of students to attend lectures; (2) didactic obstacles, namely, imperfect learning materials and SLPs (semester lecture plans) that did not include elaborating and studying basic competence as indicators; and (3) epistemological obstacles, namely, the lack of opportunities for students to practise in the field, confirm, and validate the work they had produced with practitioners (i.e., school mathematics teachers). The results showed that there were ontogenic obstacles to student readiness, a didactic obstacle to learning materials used in lectures, and epistemological obstacles to the absence of interaction with schoolteachers. After knowing the learning obstacle of mathematics learning planning lectures, this research has implications for the development of lecture designs that encourage students to produce lesson plans. The lesson plans produced by students make school students learn actively.