This time of the year, the pressure is on for both students and teachers, with both exams and Covid. For the first time, a group of student teachers I never met IRL are finalizing their first year of teacher education. Fortunately, students have been amazingly creative, even though teacher education online due to a pandemic is new to all of us.
Student teachers doing their practicum in schools were not only subjected to online teaching as students, the also had the experience of teaching and observing online teaching in schools. In Sweden, secondary education this spring was a mix of in-school and online education, where different solutions of one week home- one week online were common, to facilitate social distancing. Several student teachers took to opportunity to use their didactic tools to compare in-school and online teaching. As an example, the milieu or didactic variables of Brosseau proved helpful to describe how mainly the opportunities for students and teachers to engage in discussions online were reduced, and as a consequence, students were left to work alone with little support. For this reason, it was difficult to organize for "a-didactical situations" online, where the teachers would delegate responsibility for working with a mathematical activity to learners. As a consequence, much time for learning mathematics was lost.
The positive thing is that we all are more confident in digital tools for education. The main concern for me was never my own digital competence, but the effort to make sure how the counterpart could participate. Now, systems have improved, and everyone is more or less familiar with their use. This will probably impact the way we work and meet in the future.
Another positive thing is the movies and materials produced. Below is a screen-shot from a digitalization of a task designed by Malcom Swan (https://www.educationaldesigner.org/ed/volume1/issue1/article3/) which I moved into a digital board, where students could copy-paste digitally. It actually was easier to move the pieces around, not having everything blowing around when someone opens a window! I really think that much of the things we produced are possible to reuse later on.
I wish I had time to engage in deeper research on the different adaptations of mathematics teaching to the present situation, how teachers, student teachers and students experience the situation. I see publications of this kind will begin to appear, and I wonder if the pandemic will also alter the direction of research in mathematics education,
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