Symposia
Research Symposia on the Improvement of Teacher Education within the Framework of the Qualitätsoffensive Lehrerbildung:
Symposium 1 - Cooperation between Subject Disciplines and Subject-Related Didactics
Organiser: Dietmar Höttecke
(held in German)
In teacher training, professional and specialist didactic teaching is often too little networked. The problem of lack of networking can be located on a curricular, organizational, personal or institutional level. This inadequate networking is in contrast to the requirements placed on future teachers. They are expected to have highly networked and flexible professions knowledge. The challenges of a better networking of subject-specific and specialized didactic learning differ in the different subjects.
Contributions to the symposium are intended to address this problem complex.
Key questions are:
- How can professional and specialist didactic teaching and learning offerings be strengthened in different courses of study, between the training phases (1st and 2nd phase) or within subjects?
- What challenges arise in the cooperation between specialist science and specialist didactics in different disciplines and which measures can contribute to their overcoming?
- What expertise is particularly relevant to the professionalisation of teachers in relevant disciplines (broad, deep, exemplary, systematic, historical, ...)? To what extent and with what results can we reconstruct didactically?
- How can a better integration of professional and specialized didactic training units be achieved in the various fields of study?
Symposium 2 - Linguistic and Cultural Heterogeneity
Organiser: Drorit Lengyel
(held in German)
The consideration of linguistic-cultural heterogeneity and multilingualism in teaching by means of professional competencies also refers to professional and linguistic teaching / learning processes. The focus is on the challenges and opportunities of linguistic heterogeneity for the promotion of educational processes in the design of a language-specific subject-specific subject. Therefore, incoming teachers should be trained during the first phase of teacher training for continuous language formation, e.g. Through language-aware research-based learning, and to build up networked knowledge for the initiation of a professional competence in German as a second language and multilingualism (so-called DaZ competence). This is done in the ProfaLe project through a network of specialist disciplines, German studies and intercultural education.
The symposium focuses on the following questions:
- What are the competencies that lecture students have in order to be successful in designing a subject-specific subject with a linguistically heterogeneous pupil?
- How can "DaZ competences" and beliefs on DaZ / Multilingualism be measured or investigated?
- What approaches are there in teacher training to build up professional competence in this domain?
- What role do university and non-university learning opportunities play in the development of "DaZ competence"?
- Which models exist or are being tested in order to better coordinate the phases of teacher training in the development of professional "DaZ competence"?
Symposium 3 - Inclusion
Organiser: Gabriele Ricken
(held in German)
In order to create a successful inclusive school-system for children with different special needs it is evident that teacher-education has to be prioritized.
This means that the development of inclusion-pedagogical attitudes, knowledge and competencies has to comprise areas as such as the development of an inclusive understanding, the ability to support individually as well as the ability to collaborate in multi-professional teams.
For that, it is essential to bring together different concepts in regards to special needs, didactics and school education as well as to compare them. The symposium should be a place to discuss both the effort and limits of seminar-concepts, and matching experiences from schools. In summary, it will be possible to develop a more specific point of view in regards to concepts concerning the first phase of teacher education.
Symposium 4 - Integrating Theory and Practice in School Internships
Organiser: Thomas Zabka
(held in German)
In the course of studies, future teachers acquire theoretical and empirical knowledge about teaching objects and teaching. Novices are expected to use this knowledge and the action models derived from it in school-based studies.
However, the application of complex knowledge to new situations poses high demands, which are further increased by the fact that the school educators apply their own expectations, convictions and advice to the students. Even if the school input corresponds to the university, the actors often have different focal points and speak different 'languages', so that the students face the challenge of having to transfer unequal inputs to one another and at the same time to an unfamiliar field of application.
What support can concepts and models of university teacher training provide here in order to promote a theory- and practice-oriented professionalisation?
The symposium's contributions are to answer this question by referring to one of the following aspects:
- Research learning in the teaching practice: empirical observation of school teaching culture or controlled testing of scientifically generated concepts?
- Training of instructors as an attempt to reduce the discrepancy between university and school perspective.
- Joint observation, planning and reflection of teaching by students and teachers.
- Action Research in the Internship: Is a joint researching attitude of professionals and novices possible for their own practice under training conditions?
- Combining pedagogic and subject / didactic knowledge in the teaching practice with regard to the relationship between theory and practice.
Symposium 5 - Assessment of Future Teachers’ Opportunities to Learn and Competence Development
Organiser: Jörg Doll
(held in English)
The reform measures for improving teacher education which are currently developed, implemented and tested in the ProfaLe project are mainly domain-specific. Based on this domain-specific focus, the accompanying research investigates the students’ use of the didactical study contents offered in domain-specific learning opportunities. Additionally, the development of content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge and general pedagogical knowledge in the course of implementing the educational reforms is measured. Analyses for the subjects English, German and Mathematics are the main focus.
Symposium 6 - Innovative Approaches to Teachers’ Professional Competencies in the Area of General Pedagogy
Organiser: Johannes König
(held in English)
General pedagogical knowledge (GPK) has been identified as a central component of teacher knowledge. Although GPK is not subject-specific, nevertheless it constitutes an equally important cognitive element of teachers’ professional competence. The Symposium aims at bringing together innovative approaches of modelling and measuring teachers’ professional competencies in the area of general pedagogy.