The project coreflect@maths addresses the innovation and exchange of good practice in the field of mathematics teachers’ university education and professional development. The collaborating partners are Ludwigsburg University of Education in Germany (coordinator), King’s College London in the United Kingdom (partner), the University of Alicante in Spain (partner) and the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice in Czech Republic (partner). Each of these institutions and the participating scholars contribute to the project with their specific expertise and longstanding experience in the education of prospective mathematics teachers and the professional development of in-service teachers and teacher educators. Due to the different educational systems in the four participating countries, each institution has developed specific courses and programs for facilitating the education of future teachers of mathematics and the professional development of mathematics teachers. The connecting element between the four universities is their use of innovative course designs involving representations of practice or so-called 'vignettes' as stimulus for the reflection and discussion of real-life contexts and professional requirements related to the mathematics classroom. Vignettes represent classroom scenarios for differing purposes and can be delivered in different formats. For example, vignettes can be used for facilitating learning about content (e.g. promoting teacher discussions of pedagogy for supporting student learning of mathematical contents) and also for promoting professional discussions about other factors that influence student learning in classrooms (e.g. affective, motivational, and behavioural factors). Additionally, vignettes can be delivered as ‘examples' of practice and classroom situations as either: video clips of a 'real-life’ situation; cartoons incorporating visuals, dialogue and other information; or as text-based written descriptions of an event. Several empirical studies showed that the ability to analyse classroom vignettes is a key prerequisite for successful teaching by supporting reflections on teaching practice against relevant theoretical backgrounds. Depending on the curriculum and learning objective, vignettes can be implemented to facilitate teachers’ professional learning of content related to the teaching of mathematics. The main aim of the project is to bring together and exchange the good practice of vignette-based professional learning established by the four project partners and to enhance further innovation through collaboration. In this context, technology-mediated teacher education can be regarded as a highly promising approach as it allows teachers to engage with and reflect on various classroom scenarios in different formats (e.g. text, video, cartoon) and share European classroom culture across borders. However, existing tools in certain vignette formats (e.g. video), can only be used by native speakers and do often not take into account data protection issues, which is a major concern in educational contexts. Consequently, one of the project’s objective is to develop a multilingual digital tool within the Moodle platform to provide a free but secure system to create vignette-based learning environments. The design of this digital tool alongside with supporting material will allow for the creation and sharing of text-based, cartoon-based and video-based vignettes in four different languages (German, English, Spanish, Czech). The development of corresponding course concepts for pre-service and in-service teachers will enable and support participants from different European countries to connect with colleagues, exchange experiences, discuss practice and learn from each other about different European mathematics classroom cultures. Vignette-based test instruments will be designed and used to evaluate the effect of the developed course concepts. Another output of the project work will be the training and support of teacher educators in using vignettes and the developed digital learning environments in their professional learning activities. Regular transnational project meetings and the collaborative design of multiplier events to disseminate the project outputs are integral to the project. A set of materials in English, German, Spanish and Czech will be made freely accessible on the project homepage, providing mathematics teacher educators with extensive support for implementing digital learning environements for vignette-based learning in their courses and allowing the products of the project work to be widely disseminated.
The strategic partnership coReflect@maths brings together expertise and experience in mathematics teachers’ vignette-based professional learning and provides corresponding innovation to mathematics teacher education. Both collaboration and exchange have been achieved with extensive success. Further goals supporting this aim concern the intellectual outputs of the project. For supporting vignette-based work, the conception of a digital tool for creating cartoon vignettes (DIVER tool) has been achieved, after putting into place also initial solutions, e.g. in a Jamboard pilot environment. A second intellectual output (IO) consists in the collaborative creation of vignette-based courses for topics central in mathematics teacher education involving documented sample vignettes in the four project languages. The third IO addresses teacher educators – a corresponding course concept has been elaborated on the base of collaborative work and the course elements have been documented. State-of-the art empirical research has been carried out on vignette-based work in a set of evaluation studies (IO4). The project progress monitoring has been assured by project management, transnational project meetings, and dissemination activities.
Vignettes representing classroom scenarios have a high potential for mathematics teachers’ professional learning. Numerous empirical studies have shown that the ability to analyse classroom vignettes is a key prerequisite for successful teaching by supporting reflections on teaching practice against relevant theoretical backgrounds in mathematics education. However, already existing tools (e.g. in video format), can often only be used by native speakers, are hard to adapt to different learning objectives and mathematical topics and do often not take into account data protection issues, a major concern in educational contexts. Consequently, one of the project’s objective was to develop a multilingual digital tool within a Moodle platform to provide an easily usable and secure system to create vignettes (especially in cartoon format) and provide corresponding vignette-based learning environments organised in vignette-based courses for teacher educators. A further need concerns the lack of information and opportunity to exchange between teacher educators related to vignette-based work as described above and the still narrow base of empirical research related to professional learning in vignette-based learning environments.