Using Technology to Support a New Pedagogy of Mathematics Teacher Education

Abstract

Teacher education courses that deliver knowledge about how to change mathematics teaching to prospective teachers are ineffective in challenging their traditional ideas about how to teach. There are few models of good practice for novices to observe and examine. By making multiple images of innovative teaching and learning available for study, hypermedia technology has the potential to represent the complexities of actual work in classrooms in situations where novices can develop images of the kind of practice that reformers espouse. The authors have been designing and experimenting with hypermedia tools in preservice teacher education that involve prospective teachers in this kind of inquiry learning about mathematics teaching. Information about classroom lessons and reflections on these lessons have been assembled to provide an environment in which prospective teachers can pose questions and use data to understand teaching and learning. A course in which such cases were used as the focus of teacher education is described.