A
central desideratum for the professionalization of qualified teachers is an
improved practice of further teacher education. The present work constitutes a
course of in-service training, which is built upon both a review of empirical
findings concerning the efficacy of in-service training courses for teachers
and theoretical assumptions about the professional competences of teachers,
conducted in two Federal States of Germany from October 2014 to October 2015.
The course focuses on geographical key concepts-central geographical (big)
ideas that are systematically recurring, aiming at the promotion of
conceptional learning within geography classes. By this means, they meet a
major challenge of the field, facing a great variety of complex topics and the
difficulty to support a cumulative construction of geographical knowledge. But
there is little experience about the advantages and difficulties that occur by
using the key concept approach in geography classes. Thus it is one aim of the
in-service training to gain insights into the needs and potentials of
geographical key concepts. That is why the teacher training course is labelled
as symbiotic, as teachers learn about a new approach and supply practical
experiences about it. The term symbiotic indicates a two-way learning process,
as researchers thus can learn about the key concepts from a practical point of
view. Hitherto, the weak efficacy of further teacher trainings is often
criticised, taking into account inflexible teacher beliefs and a wide gap
between theory and practice. Based on these considerations (professional
competences of teachers, geographical key concepts, criteria for effective
in-service training) this paper represents a first step of a study. On the one
hand, a symbiotic in-service training course on geographical key concepts is
introduced that might be capable to modify teacher beliefs, for example with
respect to individual ideas of the subject-matter or the subjective theories
about teaching and learning in geography classes. On the other hand, the
expected practical experiences can help to identify obstacles for the use of
key concepts in geography classes. At the end of this article an outlook on the
study’s broader research interest and on the documentary method as a tool to
meet these aims is given. Excerpts of first data available can illustrate the
further research process
Teacher professionalization in-service training geographical key concepts teacher beliefs documentary method
Birincil Dil | İngilizce |
---|---|
Bölüm | Makaleler |
Yazarlar | |
Yayımlanma Tarihi | 30 Nisan 2015 |
Gönderilme Tarihi | 11 Kasım 2014 |
Yayımlandığı Sayı | Yıl 2015 Cilt: 5 Sayı: 1 |