Section archive - Instruction in Teacher Training

This article describes a project, which focuses on supporting competencies, which foster the ability to act in school settings by using a blended-learning scenario. The authors conclude that this project combines theoretical and practical learning by repeatedly putting students into situation, which let them prepare lessons based on their didactical knowledge, give lessons at school and reflect on them both independently as well as cooperatively in an online environment. The authors indicate that the competencies that are intended to be fostered are reflective competence and media competence in order to support students’ ability to act in school settings. During the process of this blended learning scenario, students tend to blend self-reflection and the reflection of others. In addition, students gain new awareness and knowledge by dealing with their own video material as well as material of others.

In this article, the author focuses on recognizing humor as a powerful resource for newcomers in social settings like museums. The author discusses humor as a tool families use to help themselves feel more comfortable in museums, but also to help merge their everyday agendas with those of the museum. She used exemplars of family humor come from two different research studies conducted in different institutions. The author demonstrates that the humor seen functioned as a way to involve others, to ease the tension of not knowing a new setting, language, practice, or content, as well as to help shift authority from mediator to parent, or from parent to child.

This study explored whether and how prospective teachers (PTs) fraction sense could improve in the setting of a Number and Operations course. the results from the interviews with seven participants provide evidence that their performance and flexibility in comparing fractions improved. The authors found that 6 of the 7 interview participants adopted at least two new valid strategies for comparing fractions. Consequently, these findings can guide mathematics teacher educators how to support PTs to reason meaningfully and flexibly about fraction magnitude.

This article proposes a learning development (LD) perspective to peer learning in higher education. This article focuses on the PAL scheme, which was introduced at Plymouth University in 2011 (PALS@Plymouth) with the specific intention to promote a LD perspective. The author conducted a small scale study based on informal, semi-structured interviews seeking the views of PALS leaders about how their involvement in the scheme might serve to focus attention not just on individual student needs but on to problems arising from academic practices more broadly. The interviews with the PALS leaders revealed the value of learning from peers. The author suggests that student-led sessions could offer opportunities to assimilate and gain confidence in academic discourse, as advocated by PALS leaders in this study.