The impact of online video suite on the Singapore pre-service teachers’ buying-in to innovative teaching of factorisation via Algecards

Abstract

A group of pre-service teachers at one institute of education was assigned to record their reflections as they viewed an online video suite which recorded (1) a secondary mathematics teacher employing a Concrete-Pictorial-Abstract (CPA)-based approach to teaching quadratic expansion and factorisation to a group of low-ability secondary 2 (14+) mathematics students; (2) students using concrete manipulative, AlgeCards, and pictorial representations, Rectangle Diagram, to perform quadratic expansion and factorisation; and (3) teachers, including a Head of Department (HOD), sharing their teaching experience in the use of the teaching package based on the abovementioned CPA approach. This chapter studied the impact of the online video suite on the pre-service teachers’ willingness to buy-in to innovative teaching of factorisation via AlgeCards through inspecting the written responses of these teachers to preset Milestone Tasks placed at different points along the progression of the video watching. The term ‘buy-in’ refers to the evidential shift of teacher’s belief in the applicability of the lesson innovation. We identified the salient features of the video suite which were responsible for bringing about pre-service teachers’ buying-in to the use of AlgeCards in teaching factorisation. Based on these findings, this chapter makes some recommendations on the design of teacher preparation method course using video technology.