Prospective Teachers' Learning by Triggering Student Questions in History

• In Event: Equity Across Multiple Disciplines and Contents

Abstract

Educating history teachers aims at understanding the complexity of historical thinking of students.This study departs from the idea that pupil’s questions provide beginning teachers with information about students’ historical thinking. An assignment is developed in which prospective teachers have to design, execute and reflect on a lesson that triggers student questioning. The aim is to describe how student-teachers execute this assignment and the extent to which student-teachers reflect on the historical reasoning of their students. Lesson plans, video-recordings, lesson reflections and interviews with seven teachers were analyzed. Some student-teachers succeeded in facilitating student questioning and reflected on the historical questions of students, whereas other student-teachers did not trigger student questions and mostly reflected on their own classroom organization.

Author

• Albert Logtenberg, Leiden University