Beyond supervision: Learning to teach mathematics in community

This paper examines an innovative preparation program in which pre-service teachers were paired with doctoral student mentors for the student teaching experience. Three of these student/mentor dyads were joined to form a small community throughout the internship. The study was theoretically grounded on a synthesis of constructivist and sociocultural theories. Multiple data sources (weekly lesson observations, weekly pre-and post-lesson conferences, ethnographic interviews, community meetings, lesson plans, journals and other informal sources of data) were collected to examine the research questions that framed the study. The findings centered on the participants reactions to this community approach to teacher preparation as they engaged in the process of becoming a mathematics teacher. Implications for sociocultural theories as they might be applied to teacher education efforts are presented.teacher educationstudent teaching-mathematics educationsituated cognitionsociocultural theorycommunity of practice. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.