Pre-service Mathematics Teachers’ Professional Growth In The Demo Class Practice

In education and teaching, the importance of teacher is self-evident. If we want to give high priority to the development of education, we must focus on the education to pre-service teachers. The education to the pre-service teachers has attracted widespread attention of the educational circles at home and abroad, therefore seeking the effective way to improve pre-service teachers’level of professional skills is one of the hot issues in the research of teacher education.This paper mainly studies the way to promote pre-service mathematics teachers’development of professional skills, which contains using the theory of micro teaching, and educational action mode "three stages, reflecting twice", which is built by Mr. Gu Lingyuan, for reference, and then adopt not only the mode of "preparing a lesson in groups--teaching personally--brainstorming--teacher’s reflecting--preparing a lesson again", but also self-reflection and peer coaching. The author traced two pre-service mathematics teachers as a group, and recorded their four demo math classes overall process. Each of them prepared a certain section of knowledge content in junior high school, and the same content were taught respectively two times. Every time after the finish, the brainstorming was launched and then teachers did self-reflection, which formed a "two stages, reflecting twice" mode of action. The central question of this research is:whether self-reflection and peer coaching can develop pre-service mathematics teachers’ professional knowledge and professional skills.In the process of research, the research of "quality" is used as a basic method. Mainly from the following four dimensions:design, content, role of the teacher and teaching characteristics. Analysis mainly uses research achievements of QUASAR project in University of Pittsburgh as analysis tools, that is:" mathematical task framework","mission and guidance","factors of keeping and reducing high cognitive tasks". Classification methods to mathematics teaching tasks, which is built by Dr. Li Zhongru, is used to depict the types of teaching task, and Characterization of classroom teaching behavior and question types were coded. Video analysis technology and semantic analysis of language communication were also used in this paper. Finally, a comparative vertical analysis for two classes before and after the reflection is made respectively, and thus draws the following conclusion:(1) Judging from the lesson plan design, both two pre-service mathematics teachers took their ideas from "focusing on teaching materials and paying more attention to personal experience"(round one), into "concerning students and playing a leading role"(round two), and were aware of the essence of mathematics and knowledge and experience students had mastered. The design of teaching aims, teaching task in round two became more reasonable, more appropriate to students’ zone of proximal development.(2) Judging from teaching content, high level learning tasks were set in round two, basically kept cognitive demands of high-level mathematical tasks; Combined a variety of characterization to present a teaching task, focusing on the relationship and transformation between various representations, being focused, having modest capacity and obvious links; Connected such mathematical knowledge with others, and made relationships between mathematics and other subjects, real life and students’ experience.(3) Judging from the teacher’s role, the number of questions two pre-service teachers asked basically kept the same during two rounds of teaching (questions were mainly focused on the stage of applying new knowledge), but types of questions were obviously different:mainly focusing on simple question and explanatory question in round one and mainly focusing on inferential question and explanatory question in round two. Both of them became to be able to choose appropriate teaching tasks according to the teaching goals(choosing typical examples according to teaching goals, from the surface to the spot); pay more attention to share important hints (helping students to lay a "foundation", giving explanation, some key points and various solutions for every examples).(4) Judging from the teaching style, in round two, both two pre-service teachers used the heuristic teaching which emphasizes basic knowledge and basic skills, and also improved the students’ participation, and timely found out of the teaching effect, and adjusted the teaching progress circumstantially at any time. Both of them were more likely to use situational representation to present mathematical knowledge, which created good learning atmosphere for the students. This study explores pre-service mathematics teachers’strategy improving their professional knowledge and professional skills from their perspective. Through creating a platform contributing to mathematics education students’professional development, it provides a feasible way for the professional development of pre-service mathematics teachers.