Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) is used to describe the knowledge teachers use to teach a specific subject to a specific audience. Although PCK is linked to student success and motivation, relatively little is known about the PCK of geography teachers. Through a mixed methods approach, we surveyed a group of 73 Dutch pre-service teachers in their final year of geography teacher education. We used the PCK-consensus model to address both PCK-on action (teacher knowledge) and PCK-in action (teacher practice). We investigated the former through a CoRe-assignment and the latter through a quantitative survey. Teacher’s PCK-in action focussed on teacher-centred lessons with ample attention for visualisations, current events, and efforts to engage students. The results for PCK-on action confirmed the content dependency of PCK. Pre-service teachers chose different geographical topics and used different goals and strategies when teaching these topics. In this context, we also found that they experienced difficulties when teaching controversial issues. In a final step, we combined the results of both methods for 9 teachers in individual PCK portraits. These portraits show that coherence between PCK-elements and, therefore, PCK-quality is still weak for most pre-service teachers. Consequently, their fragile subject matter knowledge seems to influence their developing PCK.
LINK
The aim of this study is to clarify how pre-service teachers perceive mentor teachers' use of mentoring skills. Sixty stimulated-recall interviews were conducted, each in connection with a previously recorded mentoring dialogue. A quantitative analysis showed that six types of mentoring skills appeared to be perceived by pre-service teachers as offering emotional support and five others as offering task assistance. After mentor teachers were trained in mentoring skills, shifts in their frequencies of use of distinct skills, as observed by independent raters, corresponded to a considerable extent with shifts in frequencies of pre-service teacher perceptions of mentor teachers' mentoring behaviour.
DOCUMENT
How can we make Inquiry-Based Science and Mathematics Education (IBSME) durable? …. by incorporating it in the pre-service programs for elementary teachers! With pre-service students the training can be much more intensive than with inservice teachers. To have an impact in the classroom the minimum contact time in IBSME in-service and coaching has to be more than 90 hours (Supovitz & Turner, 2000). That number is hard to achieve in in-service but it is quite possible in preservice teacher education. From 9 – 11 January 2013 the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA) hosted a field-visit sponsored by the EU Fibonacci project with a focus on pre-service teacher education. HvA developed two programs to strengthen IBSME in pre-service. One is an elective minor (30 ECTS) Science and Technology Education in the regularelementary teacher education program. The other is a pre-service program for academically talented students jointly developed by the University of Amsterdam and the Hogeschool of Amsterdam with inquiry as a major emphasis. The two programs are described in chapters 1 & 3 in this booklet. If you are still wondering what IBSE is, then read chapter 2 of Ana Blagotinsek of the University of Slovenia. She describes a neat example of an IBSE process with students in elementary teacher education. How do you start with a real worldquestion and initially little knowledge, and how do you investigate the question and eventually generate the knowledge needed to answer it? During the field-visit each participant presented one particularly successful approach in teacher training, for example, training teachers by ‘model teaching’ activities with these teachers’ own pupils. This method was used in different ways by 4 participants in different countries. They describe this in chapters 4 – 7. In chapter 8 colleague Frans Van Mulken describes the development of a lessonseries on graphs, rate of change, and speed using inquiry strategies inspired by the late mathematician and mathematics educator Hans Freudenthal. He also describes how pre-service students could be trained to teach the lesson series as inquiry. Simultaneously with this booklet, a Dutch booklet is published with overlapping contents but focused more on the Dutch context.
DOCUMENT
