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This study aims to enable pre‐service teachers to cooperate with teachers and to participate in solving classroom problems with the guidance of academic staff in an action research (AR) project.

Eight pre‐service teachers took an AR course and simultaneously participated in a collaborative AR project. While learning about the steps and nature of AR, pre‐service teachers worked with teachers and designed their own project proposals in order to solve classroom problems. A questionnaire about “doing” an AR and reports prepared by the pre‐service teachers were used as instruments.

Pre‐service teachers worked on different classroom problems together with the teachers and seven out of eight ARs were presented at a national teachers' conference. Moreover, all the pre‐service teachers reported that they were eager to apply AR in their future classrooms and they decided to apply their AR proposals even though the course had finished.

The study is limited by the participants and the instruments used here.

AR courses enable pre‐service teachers to take an active role in authentic workplaces, thereby encouraging them towards workplace learning.

The study shows that collaborative AR can enable pre‐service teachers to identify and solve classroom problems, thereby providing them with an environment in which to use their theoretical knowledge gained at university. Hence, AR courses could be integrated into teacher training programs in order to fulfil the missing link between theory and practice in teacher training.

The purpose of this paper is to review the research concerning the use of lesson studies in the education of secondary school prospective mathematics teachers. It discusses the adaptations made on the designs, the aims and outcomes established, the processes used, and the needed improvements in the experiences reported so far.

The scientific studies reviewed were identified in a Google search, using the key words “lesson study”, “mathematics”, and “secondary.” The identified material was recorded in a database and the themes for the analysis cover the planning, execution, and reflection phases of a formative process.

The paper identifies the several pending issues regarding the use of lesson studies in prospective teacher education such as defining the aims, establishing the relationships among participants, scaling, and adapting lesson studies for the particular purpose of educating future teachers.

At a practical level, this review suggests that lesson studies in pre-service teacher education must have a clear formative aim. It also shows that many formats are possible and must be chosen according to the specific conditions. In addition, it suggests the need for research regarding the definition of the aims, the working relationships established among participants, the problem of scale, and the problem of adaptation or simplification.

The paper identifies the key issues in the design of lesson studies in initial teacher education. It argues that besides signaling the positive outcomes, more critical (or self-critical) investigations are needed, e.g. using external researchers as “critical friends”, which address their difficulties, limitations, and drawbacks in a more thorough way.

In this chapter, we discuss cases involving pre-service mathematics teachers. These cases highlight teachers’ understanding of perspectives as they solve and analyze student work involving tasks that call for translations between algebraic and graphical representations. Findings suggest that flexible or inflexible knowledge structures influence participant’s attempt to analyze or address student thinking.

Findings from this study highlight a major concern for teacher education and IBL efforts. If teachers do not have a flexible knowledge base to draw from, teachers may fail to capture important aspects of students’ thinking and help students develop appropriate understandings. Such failure may result in missed opportunities to effectively assist students to explore, create and communicate, ideas that are core to IBL.

This paper aims to examine the cultivation of anti-racist practices with pre- and in-service teachers in post-secondary contexts, and the tensions of engaging in this work for equity and justice in urban teacher education.

The paper relies on critical race theory (CRT) and critical whiteness studies (CWS), as well as auto-ethnographic and storytelling methods to examine how black in-service teachers working with a black teacher educator and white pre-service teachers working with a white teacher educator enacted strategies for cultivating anti-racist practices.

Findings indicate that for black and white educators alike, developing critical consciousness and anti-racist pedagogical practices requires naming racism as the central construct of oppression. Moreover, teachers and teacher educators demonstrated the importance of explicitly naming racism and centralizing (rather than de-centralizing) the political project of anti-racism within the current socio-political climate.

In addition to racism, educators’ racialized identities must be centralized to support individual anti-racist pedagogical practices. Storying racism provides a context for this individualized work and provides a framework for disrupting master narratives embedded in educational institutions.

Much has been written about the importance of teachers connecting to students’ out-of-school lives to increase academic achievement and advance educational justice. Strategies for forging those connections include using assets-based practices and linking school curricula to students’ community and cultural identities. While these connections are important, this paper focuses on teachers’ explicit anti-racist practices in urban education.

Lesson study has become a popular approach for supporting the development of student-teachers within initial teacher education (ITE) programmes. In a short space of time, the original model of lesson study, originating in Japan, has been adapted to fit into the work contexts of different national systems and ITE provider structures. This chapter classifies the different emerging models of lesson study into three main groups, university and hybrid approaches, practicum approaches and heterodox approaches. Learning study is also considered, due to its developing popularity, as a practice development approach. Having outlined the different models of lesson study used in ITE, the authors go on to outline some of the main challenges and advantages of participating in lesson study which have been identified in the literature.

Beliefs about teaching influence practice and can play a powerful role in the day-to-day decision-making of teachers. Pre-service teachers commonly accrue their original set of beliefs on teaching from teacher preparation programs or personal experiences, but unlike teachers with more experience, new teachers are more susceptible to changing their beliefs on teaching once they become official teachers of record. If these beliefs change in a negative way, such as by adopting a set of beliefs that views students through a deficit lens, or capable of achieving less than their privileged counterparts, then schools will continue to foster tendencies for social reproduction instead of tendencies for social justice. In urban schools, this increase in negative perceptions of students is even more common as new teachers face challenges that are less likely to occur in non-urban schools. Findings suggest that new teachers do change their beliefs during their first year, and that these beliefs often reflect the beliefs of trusted and close colleagues within their social networks. While some teachers experienced positive changes in their beliefs and teaching practices, other teachers experienced negative changes in their beliefs that unfavorably affected students. Most teachers were unaware of their belief changes, but offered explanations for how and why their beliefs could have changed without their noticing over the course of the study. Implications and possible directions for future research are discussed.

This paper examines how intentional mathematics coaching practices can develop teacher professional noticing of “ambitious teaching practices” (NCTM, 2020) through connected, collaborative coaching cycles.

Narrative analysis is used to examine observations of a mathematics coach and novice teacher to better understand the role of the coach in helping teachers attend to ambitious mathematics teaching (AMT) practices.

The initial findings of this study suggest that intentional use of focused goals, iterative coaching cycles and a gradual release model of coaching can support shifts in noticing of AMT from being led by the coach to being facilitated by the teacher.

This study offers new insights into the functions of mathematics coaching that can foster shifts in teacher noticing and practice toward AMT. It contributes to the literature on what mathematics coaching looks and sounds like in the context of conversations with teachers, as well as the potential influence that structured, intentional, ongoing coaching supports can have on teacher noticing.

Elementary teachers' understanding of mathematics is a significant contributor to student success with mathematics. Consequently, teacher educators are frequently charged with the responsibility of supporting the development of prospective elementary teachers' mathematics content knowledge as they re‐learn concepts in ways they are required to teach. The purpose of this paper is to describe one teacher educator's efforts to support prospective elementary teachers' tenuous understanding of rational numbers.

Given the variety of factors influencing the development of teacher knowledge, a mixed method research design was utilized. Research participants were prospective elementary teachers enrolled in a nine‐week elective course who agreed to participate in the study (n=40); while the control group were prospective elementary teachers not enrolled in the elective course (n=35).

The results of this study indicate that it may be possible to improve prospective teachers' conceptual understanding of mathematics by providing additional short‐term support, such as an elective course and/or web‐based video clips. However, the program intervention can only build upon the existing knowledge that prospective teachers bring when they begin their Bachelor of Education programs.

For prospective teachers with a limited foundation in mathematics (e.g. less than four secondary school mathematics courses), short‐term support may be insufficient to compensate for their nebulous understanding of rational numbers. Based on this finding, one‐year Bachelor of Education programs might consider, either: including Grade 12 mathematics as a pre‐requisite for elementary teacher applicants; or mandating enrolment in a full‐year math content course similar to the elective course described in this paper.

The purpose of this paper is to experiment with ideas from didactical engineering (DE) in student teachers’ first experience with lesson study (LS).

This is a case study.

LS in pre-service education can be enhanced by elements from DE.

The idea indicated in the purpose is new and holds strong potential for the use of LS in teacher education.