Beginnings: Inquiry Practices: How Can They Be Taught Well?

Abstract

This chapter is about using video-based methods to help prospective teachers – our college students – to engage in careful observation and critical interpretation of children’s behavior with the goal of understanding their thinking. This is a special kind of reflective inquiry involving “formative assessments” that can guide and improve teaching (Heritage et al. 2008). Our focus is on the learning and teaching of mathematics, but our methods can work with virtually any academic discipline. We begin by describing the kind of inquiry skills that prospective teachers need to teach effectively. Next we suggest that the traditional pedagogy of college courses is not as effec- tive as it could be in promoting these skills. We propose two approaches that can help: inter- active use of video in the college classroom and a new Web-based system for video analysis. We conclude with a description of an empirical study that analyzes a set of student assign- ments to determine how students’ reflective inquiry skills develop over time in a course.