Abstract:

Teacher training is considered one of the key parameters that contribute to improving the quality and effectiveness of education systems.

In our paper we will present an activity developed within the two-year further professional training and retraining courses "Mathematics between the two cultures" organized by department of Mathematics of the University of Salerno (Italy) that is addressed to in-service teachers in secondary schools. The course aim is to train teachers in the study of the relationship between mathematics and other disciplines, through a didactic action inserted in the cultural substratum of competence teaching.

The training intended for thirty teachers, who wanted to strengthen skills in creating a personalized property of teaching in the school, consisted of a series of training activities and learning experiences based mainly on the use of teaching by skills in order to support the exchange, comparison and acquisition of new basic mathematical knowledges essential for higher education aimed at solving problems and building models of real situations.

As part of the activities carried out, the Game Theory Lab purpose was introducing a model of multilevel improvement of a teacher's multidisciplinary professional skills. For teachers the COVID-19 pandemic was an adaptive and transitional challenge, it was decided to redesign distance learning following a constructivist approach. Teachers were provided with the essential elements of theory to be able to learn-by-doing and achieve the objectives, adapting the choice strategies from time to time. The Laboratory of Game Theory in a liquid and complex context of the reality in which we live where human, natural and digital environments are dynamically interconnected, has provided teachers with tools to quickly design adaptive responses by re-reading reality through Decision Theory. The workshop idea was to build skills through the mechanism of a game (cooperative and non-cooperative) that involves the exploration of the elements necessary for its construction, the mastery of the tools to formulate strategies and choices, often in the form of successive levels or scores/awards. Teachers participated individually and in groups as agents of a game in which they had to make decisions simultaneously, sequentially, collusively or cooperatively. The game was then presented in its theoretical framework and the underlying dynamics and mechanisms and expected results in the literature were explained. Finally, the involved teachers studied some concrete cases of application of all the models in order to induce the recognition of real cases in the school and extra-curricular contexts.

The transdisciplinary skills acquired have a dual purpose: on the one hand they provided teachers with a new strategic approach to making decisions, and on the other they offered teachers new teaching tools to increase students’ engagement and motivation and to encourage learning.

Keywords:

Transdisciplinarity, teacher training, Game Theory, Mathematics.