The professional development program SINUS for Primary schools –Aims and Framework

The German professional teaching development program SINUS for Primary Schools was conducted from 2009 to 2013 and at the end of the program had almost 870 schools and about 5440 teachers participating. The implementation of the program was coordinated and evaluated by the Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (IPN) in Kiel, Germany.

The program aimed to enhance the quality of science and mathematics instruction in primary schools by supporting teachers with ten modules and five key objectives. This framework of modules and key objectives was meant to provide the impetus to improve teaching and instruction. These were based upon theoretical considerations and empirical findings that are relevant for students’ learning and school development and addressed the following aspects:

Module 1) Good tasks, 2) Discovering, researching and explaining, 3) Taking up students’ ideas, Developing essential concepts, 4) Recognizing learning difficulties, 5) Discovering students’ talents and supporting them, 6) Interdisciplinary and cross-subject teaching, 7) Taking up (girls and boys’) interests and developing them, 8) Learning independently- learning together, 9) Assisting the learning process – Assess learning, 10) Accompanying transitions.

The key objectives were 1) Implementation of educational standards, 2) Making science accessible 3) Supporting students with special difficulties or talents, 4) Analysing data from teaching evaluations and using these data for the improvement of teaching, 5) Creating transitions between primary and secondary school.

The program was evaluated according to its effects on the teacher-, instruction- and student-levels. To analyse the instruction in SINUS for Primary Schools a video study was conducted.

The video study in SINUS for Primary School

Observing teaching practices and instruction in school is useful in obtaining important information about scripts and students’ possibilities to learn through instruction. (Roth et al., 2006; Seidel et al., 2007). For a professional development program, classroom observation is a valuable research tool to obtain an impression of how program features are implemented in instruction. In this presentation, we will report on findings from video observations of teachers participating in the program as compared to teachers in a control group.

We will also take a closer look at the organization of classroom activities of lessons in grades 1-4. Classroom activities are important because they are assumed to provide time frames for certain interactions and working methods within a lesson (Seidel et al., 2007). The classroom activities are often referred to as “the surface structure” of instruction. The activities are also often categorized in terms of teacher- and student centred activities in order to specify who plays the most active role in the classroom setting. Some classroom activities are more teacher-centred (e.g., teacher talk, dictation, class discussion and circle), and some are more student-centred (e.g., individual work, partner and group work). For the purpose of program evaluation it is of great interest to identify whether and to what degree the SINUS-lessons show special characteristics compared to regular lessons in mathematics and science according to these classroom activities.

Research questions:

1) To what extent do different organizational activities appear in mathematics and science instruction in German primary school classes?

2) How does instruction among SINUS teacher-participants differ from the instruction of the control group according to organizational activities in German science and mathematics lessons?

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