Rossella Santagata Associate Professor, UC Irvine
Rossella Santagata, Associate Professor, UC Irvine
Teacher preparation programs face a significant challenge in determining how to design learning experiences that develop the combination of knowledge, practices, and dispositions needed for effective classroom teaching. Even well prepared candidates still have much to learn once they enter the profession. Dr. Santagata’s research asks whether teacher preparation can be designed to develop competencies for learning from the daily work that teachers conduct in their classrooms. In this presentation, she summarizes the conceptual framework, methods, and findings of the “Learning to Learn from Mathematics Teaching (LLMT)” project. This study documented pre-service teacher learning from a course that integrated video-enhanced activities, focused on structured and collaborative analysis of practice, into mathematics methods instruction. In addition, it followed teachers longitudinally for three years after graduation. When compared to a group of pre-service teachers who attended a more typical mathematics methods course, LLMT participants fared better on several aspects of learning-from-teaching competence. Follow-up data also suggested the long-term impact of these LLMT pre-service experiences on participants’ first three years of full-time teaching. Dr. Santagata will discuss implications for the design of pre-service teacher learning experiences and for future research.
