Research based Teacher Education as a challenge to bring results of educational research into municipal school development?

Author(s):

Anke Spies(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2016

Network:

10. Teacher Education Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

10 SES 06 A, Teacher Research

Paper Session

Time:

2016-08-24

15:30-17:00

Room:

NM-G107

Chair:

Pete Boyd

Contribution

In Germany, guidelines by government require that teacher-students should be educated to use research-based evaluation in their future teaching and conceptual work at school. Chances of research-based teacher education are discussed with the expectation to develop schools in a highly innovative way. Administration expects that teacher students are going to become professional by learning how to act as a researcher and bring up school-development with the results of their research. It seems that especially the topics of educational research offer manifold opportunities to extend the professional knowledge and competence to dissect problematic issues of school development.

But there are different problems to solve before teacher-students can apply a research-based approach to do qualitative research on problems of school development and obtain relevant results. First, most teacher-students aren’t interested in learning how to do evaluation-research on school-development issues. Second, they are not used to investigate their profession or the school system. And third, the peer-to-peer experience as an important part of research-based learning settings is different from individual competition but essential for the involvement of the teacher-students.

The presentation discusses one way of a research based setting in teacher education, developed to create new research-based settings for teacher education as well as to design new ways of methods to evaluate school development. I developed this setting to make teacher-students more sensitive for school development as a permanent process that involves team-working teachers, principals and other professionals. They do evaluation-research in a particular school that continuously uses preliminary results to improve its development and to give teacher-students an insight into practice.

Method

The experimental setup requires the student-teachers to reflect upon that development but not their own teaching. They do research at teaching practices, as well as personal and organizational processes from an academic perspective. They also reflect on the progress of their research. The setting is mainly based on research independently done yet successively passed on to other teacher-students in a peer-to-peer exchange (Spies 2016). The setting uses the ideas of “learning by inquiry” and “learning through research” as defined by Healey & Jenkins (2009, 7) and has been evaluated for four years by a mixed method evaluation. The evaluation uses a qualitative contend-analysis of inductive and deductive categories (Mayring 2000) of the following four data sets: three group discussions and one problem-based interview with teacher students after their completion of the course; four reflections written in a team process and several individually written reflections on the process of research based learning. In addition to this, the reports of 30 Master’s Theses are also part of the evaluation.

Expected Outcomes

The findings show that there is a challenge to improve research-based teacher education both to develop the individual progression and to initiate a dynamic group process as well as giving advice to the school. The teacher-students can do their research training with surprising results for their interests in school development. But they need specific advice and guiding through (a group dynamic) progress to be successful in their research and profit from the peer-to-peer-experience. What the teacher-students have learned makes them modify their attitudes toward being a teacher. However the process of research based learning is vulnerable. In addition the school’s profit as well: It is using results and feedback in its own way to contribute new issues for by student’s research.

References

Healey, M./Jenkins, A.(2009): Developing undergraduate research and inquiry. York Mayring, Philipp [2000]: Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse. Grundlagen und Techniken (7. Auflage, erste Auflage 1983). Weinheim: Deutscher Studien Verlag 2000 Spies, A. (2016): Das Peer-to-Peer-Prinzip des forschenden Lernens. In: Mieg, Harald/Judith Lehmann (Hrsg.): Forschendes Lernen – Programmatik und Praxis Frankfurt/M. (i.p.)

Author Information

Anke Spies (presenting / submitting)

Carl-von-Ossietzky-University Oldenburg

Pedagogic

Oldenburg

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