The current results of school and teaching research clearly show that the way a teacher acts has a significant part in the improvement of education. In principle, a functional chain is assumed here: improvement in the teacher training generates better teachers, who on their part generate improved learning and experiencing processes with their pupils (Galuzzo/Craig 1990; Lipowski 2006, Terhart 2004; Reintjes 2007). PISA and IGLU suggest the idea that one important aspect of good teaching is the “productive handling of heterogeneity”, which is realised by means of individualising teaching. But in spite of convincing concepts and arguments, the majority of German teaching staff sticks to a type of education centring around the teacher (Bohl 2000). In order to challenge this fact, standards have been included into the guidelines for teacher training, according to which prospective teachers are supposed to be enabled to acquire skills in the accomplishment of individualising learning already during the first phase of their training (KMK 2004). Up to the present day, these skills have not been sufficiently emphasised during the first phase of teacher training in Germany (Schubarth et al. 2005). Diagnostic, mentoring and methodical skills, diversity in terms of tasks and, last but not least, the teachers’ beliefs are decisive for a learning and teaching culture in which diversity is valued and used productively. In teacher training – just as well as in other learning processes – one must thereby consider that predominantly those professionally relevant academic cognitions are anchored which support one’s own subjective theory (Mandl/Huber 1983). Thus, it is essential to be aware of the existing subjective theories, for research into the relation of knowledge and action in professional life suggest that prospective teachers’ subjective theories influence the way they will act as teachers later (Pauli et al. 2005, Helmke 2003). One central task during the first phase of the teacher training accordingly consists in the development of learning arrangements in which these subjective theories are considered and can be used for the creation of an academically substantiated reflexive professional knowledge. The aim of the indive project, which is a project of the universities Duisburg-Essen and Dortmund, is the further development of a model of practical phases within the teacher training, a model focusing on the development of basic skills in individualising education. The development of a successful model of practical phases requires knowledge of the students’ and the practising teaching staff’s subjective theories as the basis on which an efficient intervention in the form of an appropriate preparation of the practical phases can be generated.

The methodical approach for the subjective theories’ ascertainment results from problem-centered interviews (Witzel 2000) as well as from their communicative validation by dialogue-hermeneutic methods (Groeben/Scheele 2001). Besides, assignments of tasks and scripts of teacher students are evaluated and analysed with regard to their subjective theories.

In the lecture, first results will be presented by means of deducing from the subjective theories implications for the concept development of the subsequent intervention survey – the indive-model of practical phases.