Search results for: Lesson plans

The authors engaged preservice teachers in a redesigned mathematics field experience with a central focus on children’s reasoning through teaching experiments and purposeful reflection on practice through Lesson Study. Indicators of effective teaching were examined through analysis of lesson plans and enactment, comparing student teachers who participated in the revised approach with student teachers in conventional forms of field experience. Findings suggest that teaching aspects fostered by the revised approach during the field experience had a positive residual effect during student teaching. Those who took part in teaching experiments and lesson study had lesson plans that provided for sense-making, encouraged collaboration, and included investigative mathematics to a greater degree than those in the conventional group. Those in the revised group implemented lessons during student teaching that were more student-centered and considerate of classroom culture than those who took part in the conventional field experience. We provide recommendations for designing field experiences.

Despite their increasing population, many teacher preparation programs have yet to provide adequate preparation for teaching Emergent Bilinguals (EBs). To respond to this situation and to the high demand for effective teachers of EBs, the authors investigated how preservice teachers (PSTs) adapt mathematics lesson plans for EBs. Twenty-one secondary mathematics PSTs, enrolled in two university-based programs, participated in this study and developed lesson plans for EBs. The authors’ analysis revealed that although the PSTs frequently implemented visuals and group work strategies for EBs, they need to better integrate EBs’ funds of knowledge and academic language support.

This article examined how mentor teachers help interns in learning to plan lessons. The author revealed that some of the interns attempted to teach meaningful content but failed to consider ahead of time the nitty-gritty details or they attempted to teach a lesson that lacked a clear, worthwhile purpose. She understood that the interns often taught from plans that their collaborating teacher had read through and approved of Hence, she wanted to help the collaborating teachers consider playing a larger role in helping interns strengthen individual lesson plans before interns actually taught from those plans. The author concludes that becoming a teacher of planning requires mentors to possess conceptual and practical knowledge of instructional planning, how novices learn to plan, and how to teach planning.

In this article, the authors are interested to measure the preservice teachers' Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) and their personal constructs of teaching about mathematics lesson plans during their teacher education program. The results of the content analysis show that the constructs of the pre-service teachers have a wide variation and could be summarized within different themes. TELPS could also indicate whether there is a difference between first semester pre-service teacher students’ PCK and final semester pre-service teachers’ PCK. The authors conclude that the development of PCK is an important element of any teacher education program, and TELPS appears to be useful in determining pre-service teachers’ PCK.