Teachers training in a realistic context

There is an important need to prepare preservice teachers for the teaching of statistics. We will describe an experiment set up to achieve effective teacher training in statistics in the setting of an Italian university. Student–teachers had to prepare lessons using a real data set collected from the Italian mail services. Not only did they look into all the usual basic concepts of statistics, but they also questioned and dealt with doubts and errors their pupils put forth. They discovered the richness of the concepts, the content of descriptive statistics and the basic analyses of observed data. This experiment showed that the data, although very simple, is rich and productive, and that effective teacher training can be set up even with modest resources when there is determination and motivation.