A fresh approach to the use of video in the preservice teacher education context

Over the last six months and with the cooperation of a group of our education students and some of our schools, we have developed a video containing a total of twenty small teaching segments. Each segment ranges from between 3 minutes for the shortest to 8 minutes for the longest, with each one managing to vividly highlight a salient aspect of method for the teaching and learning of "Number" in the primary school. We are suggesting that video material such as this has the potential to assist pre-service teachers to grow their own personal, practical theories about teaching mathematics in the primary years of schooling. The video presents small slices of teacher-learner interaction related to numeracy tasks, episodes that expose some of the common mis-understandings and mis-conceptions of primary students. Each video episode also illustrates the approach adopted by the novice teacher to overcoming the learning difficulty of the child and that adopted by the teacher educator. These then become the focus of attention of pre-service teachers. They are invited to consider ways of dealing with various aspects of the problems presented by the children. The visual presentation of these problems and solutions adds considerable impact to their pedagogic merit.

This video now makes it possible to give our mathematics education students here at the University of Southern Queensland the opportunity to vary, modify and/or adapt method in an effort to complement pedagogy and equally, vary, modify and/or adapt pedagogy to complement method. In each episode there are two people assisting each other, sometimes with varying degrees of success, to elicit understanding in the third person, a child. One of the two people involved is a novice student teacher and the other person is myself. At the time of the conference I will be in the concluding stages of an initial trial of this material with a group of 240 students here and a further 40 students who study off campus. I will be in a better position at that time to report on student reactions to the use of such material in their course.