Recent reports from NOKUT, as well as national and international research, point to challenges in teacher education related to the perceived ‘gap’ between campus education (what student teachers do on campus) and in-school education (what they do in school placement, and to some extent the transition from teacher education to professional work). Many of these challenges are general, but there are also challenges that are specific to the subject of mathematics. Mathematics is demanding, and student teachers often experience mathematics as difficult, with the consequence that they feel little professional security in their own teaching. In addition, many student teachers are used to very teacher-centered teaching, and it is challenging to shift their ‘vision’ of good mathematics teaching to student-centered teaching practices.

The MaTEN project is situated in Norwegian teacher education for primary (grades 1-7) and lower secondary (grades 5-10) grades. Both programs are five-year study programs with the mandatory writing of a master’s thesis in the final year. In the 1-7 program, all student teachers have Mathematics during the first two years, and later they can choose an additional course and also specialize in Mathematics for their master’s thesis. In the 5-10 program, student teachers choose either Mathematics or Norwegian as a school subject during the first years, and, like for the 1-7 program, they can later specialize in Mathematics for their final years and master’s thesis. For both programs, all Mathematics courses integrate content (mathematics) and pedagogy (the teaching and learning of mathematics).

The first Work Package of the MaTEN project will be a mapping study of Norwegian mathematics teacher education in primary/lower secondary teacher education programmes (for grades 1-7 and 5-10). We will collect experiences and approaches that we can build on in the design of collaborative models and teaching activities. In addition, the mapping study is of interest in itself, as there are no previous similar studies of Norwegian mathematics teacher education. This part does not involve collaboration with schools.

The second Work Package focuses on the first three years of the MGLU programmes. Here, we also rely on international research on practice-based teacher education, where students are allowed to take part in ‘approximations’ to practice without being in an ordinary practice placement. Examples are practice practice through role-playing or ‘simplified’ practice situations, or joint work with planning and reflection. We have used such approaches in teaching and also researched them in recent years; yet, larger, systematic studies are lacking. We will collaborate closely with Mathematics teachers to build a common foundation for mathematics teacher education. This common foundation consists of visions of what good mathematics teaching is, teaching practices that are important and useful for student teachers to work with (for example, the practice of “leading a mathematical conversation”), attitudes towards mathematics teaching, and understandings needed to do good mathematics teaching (about mathematics, and about student learning). We will discuss how this foundation can be used in teacher education before, during, and after the school placements the students are going to do, so that the campus and school-based parts of a course in mathematics teacher education are experienced as coherent and not detached. We will then design and test teaching in different courses, where aspects related to the school placement will be part of what is studied.

The third Work Package is aimed at the last two years of teacher education, where student teachers specialize in mathematics education and ultimately write a master's thesis in the field. Many students experience the master’s thesis as a kind of ‘academic obligation’, which benefits neither the practice schools nor future workplaces. We have experience in the project group with models for supervision that also involve practice teachers, with the intention of making the master’s thesis more relevant for the profession. We want to lift such models into “ordinary use”, with the adjustments that are then required. We will also design activities in various courses to create a connection between practice and theory, and in particular, we will make interventions concerned with the supervision of master’s theses. We want to build on the experiences from the LAB-Ted project, such as letting practice teachers play a role in anchoring the master’s theses in the school’s needs, that students must cooperate on data collection (to reduce the ‘pressure’ on schools), and that the master’s project will be brought back into the school at the end.

The results of the MaTEN project can be divided into two types: Collaboration models (how teacher educators and practice schools can collaborate with the common goal of educating the best possible mathematics teachers), and concrete design principles for courses in teacher education. Collaboration models and experiences related to these will be highly relevant for all schools that accept practice students, both from MGLU and other studies with practice (e.g., the five-year associate professor education for grades 8-13). It is an explicit goal of the project that the collaboration models should be sustainable, that is, that they can be used in “ordinary use” with the resources normally allocated to the teachers and teacher educators involved in school placement. We will continuously make the results from the project available on this website.