Abstract
Delivering effective online instruction to preservice teacher candidates is important to ensure teachers are prepared for K–12 classrooms. Formal education has been reimagined several times throughout history, with both K–12 and higher education settings seeing significant changes in recent decades. Additionally, elementary teachers and preservice teacher candidates often view mathematics as only facts and procedures for memorization—a belief that infiltrates their instructional practices. Colleges that prepare teacher candidates must respond to this misconception. This chapter explores strategies one online university used to help preservice teacher candidates maximize student success by implementing live webinars called Put It into Practice (PiiP). During these sessions, preservice teachers explore online tools that can be used in the K–12 classroom to conceptualize math concepts. The webinars challenge preservice teachers to analyze how to teach math in today's classroom, while modeling the key prerequisite of establishing a safe psychological environment conducive to learning.
TopBackground
Online teacher preparation programs should embrace and enact ways to help teacher candidates increase student retention and conceptualize math concepts. This chapter will explore how one online university embraces adult learning principles to effectively engage preservice teachers in online learning strategies that help students in the K–12 classroom conceptualize math, compared to the more traditional approach. The teaching and learning process is dynamic, and delivering effective online instruction to preservice teacher candidates is important to ensure that teachers are prepared to enter the K–12 classroom.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Mathematics Methods: Math methods help prepare teacher candidates to enter the K–12 school system and introduce teacher candidates to the constructivist and social-cultural learning theories. Additionally, math methods provide the structure to support teacher candidates with best practices and strong pedagogical strategies to support math acquisition in the K–12 setting.
Virtual Manipulative: A virtual manipulative is an interactive, technology-enabled visual representation of a dynamic mathematical item that includes all of the programmable elements. A virtual manipulative allows students to manipulate the object to help with the construction of mathematical knowledge ( Van de Walle et al. , 2019 ).
Constructivism: Constructivism is the concept that learners are not blank slates but rather producers or architects of their own. People adapt their previous schemas to integrate new concepts through reflective cognition, which is the endeavor to link existing ideas to new information ( Van de Walle et al., 2019 ).
Procedural Fluency: Procedural fluency is sometimes mistaken with the ability to perform basic algorithms properly and rapidly, but it is much more. Efficiency, accuracy, flexibility, and appropriate strategy selection are the four components of fluency ( Van de Walle et al., 2019 ).
Conceptual Understanding: Conceptual understanding occurs when there is a relational understanding of mathematical concepts that is a fluid network of links and interconnections of ideas, interpretations, and pictures of mathematical concepts are formed ( Van de Walle et al., 2019 ).
Virtual Environments: A virtual learning environment in educational technology is a web-based platform for the digital aspects of courses of study, usually within educational institutions. In this context, virtual learning may take place through an online platform to reinforce a social-cultural learning environment.
Crosscutting Concepts: Ideas that appear across multiple domains within the math curriculum, helping to connect and interrelate mathematical knowledge