Education for the Future – An International Cooperation Programme for Education Professionals: Holland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein

Author(s):

Frank Brückel(presenting / submitting)Rachel Guerra(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2011

Network:

1. Continuing Professional Development: Learning for Individuals, Leaders, and Organisations

Format:

Paper

Session Information

01 SES 04 A, Looking Back, Looking Forward

Paper Session

Time:

2011-09-14

08:30-10:00

Room:

K 31/201,1 FL., 26

Chair:

Ene-Silvia Sarv

Contribution

How should a Certificate of Advanced Studies (CAS) programme be designed when it firstly needs to embrace internationally discussed themes such as the development of education in two different countries and secondly needs to be accepted by teachers and school principals, since the aim of the course is that it has a long-lasting effect on the participant’s day-to-day work?

The concept of the CAS «International School Development: Finland/Switzerland» corresponds closely to the empirical results of Altrichter (2010) and Lipowsky (2010), who have researched the effectiveness of implementation of teacher development into teaching practice. They summarize concrete structural pedagogical and methodological characteristics that are typical for effective further education:

Effective further education …

is time-intensive
includes external experts
tends to have a narrow topical focus
encourages the participants to carefully reflect their own practice
is particularly effective for change when there is a «clash» between one‘s own expectations and convictions on the one hand, and the experiences during the course on the other (dissonances)
displays a combination of reflection and putting it to the test (theory-practice relationship)
links to the individual prerequisites of the participants.

Based on these points the 15-month programme offered a cooperation on the level of day-to-day school business: Finnish and Swiss headmasters and teachers (mainly from Tampere (Fi) and Zurich (CH)) worked together in tandems discussing current themes of school development. The participants received theoretical inputs, had the chance to see day-to-day school life of the partner country and get advice for planning and implementing new projects in their own schools. The programme was accepted as a Certificate of Advanced Studies, recognised in both countries.

With the first course now completed, this paper first discusses the concept behind the programme. In a second step the paper presents results out of a qualitative study which evaluated written responses from the course participants at three different time points. In a third step we show how the results led to a new programme which will start in 2012. This new course will be carried out with new partners: the Hogeschool van Amsterdam - School of Education (NL), the Zurich University of Teacher Education (CH) and the Principality of Liechtenstein (FL).

Method

The first part of the paper focusses on theoretical and practical analyses of the needs of continuing education in both countries. Our interest was to find out which contents of the programme were most important. So we asked the participants to write individual and open reflections at three different time points during and after the programme: after a joint meeting in Finnland (October 2008), after a joint meeting in Switzerland (June 2009) and seven month after the end of the programme (March 2010). We used two open ended questions: - Topics that impressed me most. - How relevant are these topics for my daily school life? The evaluation followed the methodolgy of the qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2009; Steigleder, 2008). Two raters evaluated the 42 written documents using deductive category application. The categories were a priori defined based on the theoretical aspects. Sentences were defined as code units and paragraphs were defined as context units. Then each code or context unit of the text was assigned to a category. Based on the findings in the text the a priori categories were altered or new categories were added. The two raters compared their categories and reconciled any differences.

Expected Outcomes

The analysis confirms the correct conception and the relevance of the findings. Participants found the following contents most important: The look into the daily school life of the partner from abroad and the possibility to discuss their own school. The confrontation with dissonance led to the best learning results on an individual level. Participants found theoretical aspects most helpful if they were directly linked with the contents of the programme and with the practical experiences in the schools. Finally, the tandems were considered important, because they enabled direct communication from person to person. Was the tandem not working out the risk of disappointment was high. Especially when the participants had to implement a project in their own school (of something they had seen in the school of the partner country), the contentment was high. For our future programme we consider the following points: 1. The insight in the daily school life of the partner ist highly important. 2. The mixture between theory and practice must be appropriate. 3. The implentation of an individual project has to be a «must». 4. The tandem-structure must be improved in that every participant has an obligation Therefore we will work with «learning-contracts» in future.

References

Altrichter, H. (2010). Lehrerfortbildung im Kontext von Veränderungen im Schulwesen. In F. Müller, A. Eichenberger, M. Lüders & J. Mayr, Lehrerinnen und Lehrer lernen. Konzepte und Befunde zur Lehrerfortbildung (S. 17 – 34). Münster: Waxmann Brückel, F. & Schildknecht, J. (2010). Konzeption eines binationalen Certificate of Advanced Studies «Schulentwicklung». Leitende Kriterien der Planung. In F. Müller, A. Eichenberger, M. Lüders & J. Mayr, Lehrerinnen und Lehrer lernen. Konzepte und Befunde zur Lehrerfortbildung (S. 423 – 436). Münster: Waxmann Brückel, Frank (2010). Hoher Lerngewinn garantiert. Konzeption und Evaluation eines internationalen Weiterbildungsstudiengangs. In Weiterbildung 21, Heft 4, 30 - 33 Lipowsky, F. (2010). Lernen im Beruf – Empirische Befunde zur Wirksamkeit von Lehrerfortbildung. In F. Müller, A. Eichenberger, M. Lüders & J. Mayr, Lehrerinnen und Lehrer lernen. Konzepte und Befunde zur Lehrerfortbildung (S. 51 – 70). Münster: Waxmann. Mayring, P. (2009). Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse. In U. Flick, E. von Kardoff & I. Steinke. Qualitative Forschung (S. 468 – 475). Hamburg: Rowohlt Steigleder, Sandra (2008). Die strukturierende qualitative Inhaltsanalyse im Praxistest. Marburg: Tectum.

Author Information

Frank Brückel (presenting / submitting)

Zurich University of Teacher Education

Division of Continuing Professional Development

Zurich

Rachel Guerra (presenting)

Department of Education

Department of Obligatory School

Vaduz

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