Pre-Service Mathematics Teachers’ Lesson Plans as a Source of Information About Their Readiness to Teach Online

Abstract

This paper presents a study of lesson plans created by pre-service mathematics teachers (PMTs) from two universities (Faculty of Education, Charles University in Prague, and Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics, Comenius University in Bratislava) in the course Didactics of Mathematics. The collaboration of the two research teams brought new perspectives on several questions that were come across in one or the other group of PMTs. The focus of the study was on lesson plans since the lesson plan is one of the significant parts of mathematics teacher education. The studied issues were the PMTs’ willingness to implement digital technologies (DT) in their lesson plans and the changes in their lesson plans that could be linked to the COVID-19 pandemic. For data processing, a mixed research design was used. In the qualitative part of the research, the thematic analysis resulted in identification of several codes related to the hybrid mode of teaching. In the quantitative part, Statistical Implicative Analysis (C.H.I.C) was applied. Relations inside the groups of PMTs and among them are presented and discussed in the paper by interpreting the results from the implicative trees and graphs. We concluded that (i) PMTs from our sample are, to a limited extent, prepared for using DT in their teaching, (ii) PMTs used DT in their teaching mainly for testing and feedback collection, (iii) PMTs in our sample focused on the content and the choice of software (or application, applet, etc.) when preparing a lesson plan. Besides that, we found (by using C.H.I.C.) that not all codes identified in thematic analysis were connected to the others. The findings are of interest to teacher educators in general, researchers interested in teachers’ lesson planning, and in-service teachers in general. In this paper we focus on PMTs’ lesson plans. We plan to do a similar analysis of in-service teachers’ lesson plans in order to gain a deeper insight into the role of experience in the studied domain.