Linking theory and practice: a case study of a co-teaching situation between a mathematics teacher educator and a primary classroom teacher

In recent years there has been growing concern as to how to bridge the gap between the theory pre-service teachers engage with as part of their learning in their tertiary classrooms and the profession. To enable pre-service teachers to make stronger connections with the profession, a mathematics teacher educator worked collaboratively with a practicing teacher by co-teaching one cohort of pre-service teachers studying primary mathematics education. In this paper, we present two snapshots of the co-teaching experience and a framework that was used to describe how the co-teaching partnership helped the pre-service teachers to elicit mathematical thinking make connections between theory and practice, when engaged in mathematical discourse.