Developing pre-service teachers’ knowledge for teaching in the early years: Selecting and sequencing

Developing pre-service teachers’ (PSTs’) knowledge of pedagogical practices can be particularly challenging within university classrooms. Teacher educators are well placed to provide PSTs with theoretical perspectives on pedagogical practices; what is particularly challenging, however, is linking theory with practice and developing PSTs’ breadth and depth of knowledge in mathematical concepts. In this article, we describe the experiences undertaken by two cohorts of PSTs during their tutorials designed to assist them to notice and discuss Year 2 students’ responses to an array task. Open-coding was used to analyse PSTs’ selection and sequencing of five different work samples. Findings indicated that while the authentic work samples assisted the PSTs to make connections with the students’ mathematical understandings, the lesson also provided an insight into the PSTs’ own foundation knowledge of mathematical understandings relating to children’s development of multiplicative thinking.