Developing Pedagogies in Teacher Education to Support Novice Teachers' Ability to Enact Ambitious Instruction

Abstract

What might it take to support novice teachers to develop the commitment and the capacity to enact ambitious mathematics instruction? In this paper, we describe our experimentation with pedagogies in teacher education to develop novice teachers ’ competence in eliciting, responding to, and advancing students ’ mathematical thinking. Our efforts centre on the use instructional activities as a tool in supporting the learning and doing of features of ambitious instruction. We explain our use of guided public rehearsal as a pedagogical practice for helping novices practice the interactive contingent nature of classroom teaching in a way that supports their direct interaction with children. This paper describes the aims of a collaborative effort1 to support novices2 to teach mathematics. We will discuss our efforts to re-imagine and develop our practice for supporting mathematics instruction. To accomplish this, we will describe what we mean by preparing novice teachers for ambitious practice, explain why we have chosen to use instructional activities as the unit of practice to engage novice teachers, and describe our use of public guided rehearsals in teacher education courses. We end this paper with challenges we have faced thus far in developing our pedagogies.