Mathematics teacher education with university within school model and Flipped classroom technique

Abstract

Abstract : I taught ‘Introduction to Mathematics Teaching course’ using Flipped classroom. This was the first time I used flipped classroom to teach this course. The main objective of the course was to introduce the ‘mathematics teaching’ profession to first year students and to have pre-service teachers some teaching experience with children. For this course, we also adapted University within School model, where we valued the experience of being at our work places which is ‘schools.’ MEF University adopted this model for the whole Faculty of Education. Flipped classroom technique was adopted university wide. Therefore, this course is unique that it connects both University within school model and flipped classroom method. In Flipped classroom, it is essential to use videos. Throughout 14 weeks of instruction, we had four main sources of videos: 1) videos that I created related to reading the book called ‘Empowering Beginning Middle School Teachers’ 2) pre-service teachers’ own created videos (related to their teaching of 6th grade students) 3) videos that I took last year during my own teaching of 5th grade mathematics classroom 4) YouTube videos from a well known mathematics educator, Jo Boaler- Stanford University, about mathematics education. In the presentation, I will discuss how we used the videos, what the benefits and disadvantages of using them are. Using University within School model, each pre-service teacher was assigned to a pair of students that they taught parallel concepts to the school mathematics. They had 8-weeks of one-to-one teaching for 2 hours per week. Related to pre-service teachers’ interactions with 6th grade students, they had weekly reflection journals which they answered structured questions. In the presentation, I will discuss the details of their journals and the feedbacks they gave about their experiences related to the foundations of this course.