USING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT CONTEXTS TO STRUCTURE PROSPECTIVE TEACHER EDUCATION

Abstract

There is an evident gap between prospective teachers’ education and their subsequent career in the profession, in particular when it comes to involvement in programmes directed at practising teacher education. One means of bridging this gap is to regard teacher education as a circular process in which practising teacher education programmes can provide packages of authentic class-based problems and perspectives for use in prospective teacher education contexts. Practising teacher education programmes are a particularly fruitful source of focal points, which can be used to direct prospective teachers’ reflections towards the construction of their professional knowledge. In this scenario, experienced teachers share with prospective teachers, samples of their classroom practice (via video recordings and other media), along with their reflections on the same, to be analysed with the support of the appropriate theoretical tools. By this means, prospective teachers can benefit from multiple perspectives, challenge their preconceptions about mathematics teaching, problematize practice, and, above all, direct their education towards the exercise of their profession and initiate the shift from prospective to future teachers. In short, this chapter aims to highlight how practising teacher education (especially in contexts of professional development) can feed into prospective teacher education in the form of genuine teaching tasks, underlining the role of the resources which enable the value of experience to be passed from serving professionals to prospective teachers.