Pre-service teachers' perspectives: Pedagogical challenges of teaching mathematics on sea-teacher project

Abstract

In order to cope with rapid changes in 21st century, preparation of pre-service teachers is viewed as crucial to the quality of teacher workforce. This article presents the findings of a study of Indonesian-Thailand pre-service teachers that participated in SEA- Teacher Project. This study used qualitative method to describe pre-service teachers' perspective on pedagogical challenges as they participated in observations, assist in teaching, teach and reflect. Drawing from participant field notes, surveys and semi-structured interviews, by open-questions this study seeks to investigate the problems. During those phases, this study gathered the pre-service teachers' field notes that indicates some challenging pedagogical experiences influenced their perspective in teaching mathematics. The findings reveal that language becomes their major challenge in delivering material (80%) that affected their perception in explains a topic, concept or procedure in mathematics. Some of them overcame this problem by developing learning media. Pre-service teachers are given the opportunity to do practice teaching, but some of them (30%) are given only 2-3 meetings, that causes pre-service teachers couldn't develop variation of teaching strategies. Pre-service teachers did not have enough time to learn school's curriculum and resulted in students having difficulties in developing lessons plan.They then try to keep the curriculum in their home country (40%) or used the lesson plan as an example in school (60%). Some obstacles experienced by pre-service teacher (20%) as they have to taught large classes (up to 50 students).They had to work hard in order deal with different characters of students so the class remain conductive. In deal with misconception when students make mistakes in working on a problem 90% of them only give the right answer, without exploring the possibility of a misconceptions. In practice only 30% of them identify the cognitive demands of students who are taught during the observation activity and assist of teaching. Limitations on school infrastructure such as LCD, computers, and internet inhibit the pre-service teacher to develop ICT based learning (50%) but they overcome the limitation by developing students' worksheet and contextual mathematics model.