Abstract
This chapter presents a practice-based teacher education activity addressing the power of exploratory tasks to foster students’ learning and the role of the teacher conducting classroom discussions regarding such tasks. First, this activity involves the teachers in analysing a given algebra task, its potential for the mathematics classroom, and the possible difficulties for the students. Then, the teachers observe a classroom episode with students presenting and discussing solutions for the task under the guidance of the teacher and strive to interpret the events. And, finally, the participants reflect on the contrast of what they previously thought and what they saw happening in the classroom. The chapter discusses the potential of such practice-based activities for teacher education.
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Notes
- 1.
Students at 1st cycle of basic education (grades 1–4), are aged 6–9 years, at 2nd cycle (grades 5–6), 10–11 years, and at 3rd cycle (grades 7–9), 12–14 years. In fact, students are often retained at a particular grade, and, therefore, in a given class it is frequent to see students with the expected age together with students that are 1 or 2 years or more older.
- 2.
The participants in this teacher education activity continue to have their regular teacher duties, teaching their own classes. They will act as workshop leaders just for about 5 hours a month, during 5 months. Therefore, in this chapter, they will be referred to as “participants” or “teachers”.
- 3.
The initiative for the design of the task, the recording of classroom work, and its analysis was part of the activities of the Portuguese Group of International Comenius Project PDTR—Professional Development of Teachers Researchers. I am the national coordinator of this group and the project, besides Portugal, involves groups of teachers from Poland, Hungary, Italy, and Spain.
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da Ponte, J. (2011). Using Video Episodes to Reflect on the Role of the Teacher in Mathematical Discussions. In: Zaslavsky, O., Sullivan, P. (eds) Constructing Knowledge for Teaching Secondary Mathematics. Mathematics Teacher Education, vol 6. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09812-8_15
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