Rethinking Teacher Education Curriculum Reform from Practical Knowledge: A Research on Teaching Videos of Student Teachers

• In Event: Sustainability Praxis: Teacher Innovations and Professional Development

Proposal

Objectives or purposes: In China, it has been acknowledged that teachers’ practical knowledge is an important knowledge base for teachers’ professional development. Cultivating practical knowledge of pre-service teachers at normal universities in initial teacher education plays a fundamental role in the recent reform of teacher education curriculum.
Looking at the development of teacher education worldwide, it is not difficult to find that the global teacher education reform directly revolves around the relationship between educational theory and practice. It is the main trend of the current teacher education reform to replace the technical rationality with the practical orientation. Curriculum standards for teacher education issued by Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (2011) specifically defined that we should take “practice-oriented, and life-long learning” as the core concept of teacher education curriculum. By optimizing the structure of teacher education curriculum and strengthening the links of education practice, we should improve the practical ability of pre-service teachers and make them to be reflective practitioners.
The present study aim to answer: What is the representation of practical knowledge among normal school students in real teaching situations? What are the differences in the representation of practical knowledge among normal school students in different disciplines and their reasons?
Research hypotheses and theoretical framework: Representations of pre-service teachers’ practical knowledge of the present study is mainly informed by Chen (2011). She closely related to the expression of subordinate knowledge about self, subjects, students, and situations influenced by teachers’ beliefs about the essence of education. Among them, pre-service teachers have strong theoretical foundation, but their teaching is rigid, and the representation of practical knowledge mainly focuses on situational symbol, visual, and rules of action. To this end, we use content characteristics as the classification standard, and take pre-service teachers’ practical reflection, inter-group interaction innovation and classroom stress response as the generation methods, and summarize the representation of teacher students’ practical knowledge into the five categories: Label representation, Symbolic representation, Visual representation, Action representation and Language representation.
Methods: Derived from microteaching, which appeared in the 1960s, video analysis is a feedback research method to improve teachers’ professional development ability with the assistance of multimedia technology. In China, video analysis as a method is mainly used in public class of research teaching. Public class refers to the teaching form presented by teachers in public places, which is a unique form of teaching research in China.
In order to be fully familiar with and fully analyze the video, we watch a video two to four times after receiving it. When watching the first time, researchers should intervene in the research as an observer, that is, watch the continuous classroom teaching from the whole perspective. Look at the second time, researchers should watch after the first time set a wide range of value target and specific learning goals, diagnosis to video and transcriptional analysis.
Data sources: This study takes the teaching videos of pre-service teachers recorded during their school placement as the raw data to capture the authentic representations of their practical knowledge. By collecting the teaching videos of 66 pre-service teachers of different disciplines in Langueage, Mathematical and art (including 7 subjects in Chinese, English, Mathematics, Science, Information Technology, Music and Art), taking the representation of practical knowledge as the unit of analysis, the coding list was established and assigned for analysis to capture the practical knowledge of pre-service teachers.
We first labelled the 66 pre-service teachers with anonymous (ST1,ST2……ST66). Then we constructed the “List of Representation of Practical Knowledge of Pre-service teachers in Classroom Teaching”. Based on the list, we assigned values to the classroom record performance provided by each pre-service teacher. We use score 1 as the full mark standard to quantitatively evaluate the knowledge representation performance of pre-service teachers.
Results and discussion (with tables and charts here): In terms of differences between subject categories, pre-service teachers of mathematics and science are good at situational teaching. Art teachers focus on the humanistic orientation. The overall representation level of practical knowledge of language teachers is at a disadvantage, but the systematisms of classroom is emphasized.
In terms of differences within the same discipline, the degree of music pre-service teachers’ attention to students is obviously weaker than that of art pre-service teachers. In mathematics class, there are obvious differences in the representation of label, visual and language. Language pre-service teachers also lack in the representation of action and language types of practical knowledge.
In terms of differences between specific disciplines, the representation of practical knowledge of pre-service teachers has strong and weak contrast. Specifically, their teaching is usually more context and less culture in symbol representations, more involvement and less understanding in visual representations, strong beliefs and weak characteristics in label representations, strong teaching and weak consciousness in action representations and more encouragement and less logic in language representations.
From the perspective of cultivating the practical knowledge of pre-service teachers, we provide the following suggestions for the current teacher education curriculum reform: Teacher education should perfect educational practice and eliminate the knowledge insufficiency. Specifically, increasing the proportion of practice in teacher education and reforming the teaching method of teacher education. Teacher education should also break the discipline boundary and resolve the stereotypical teaching, Specifically, cultivating teachers with interdisciplinary ability, then guiding and regulating concurrent teaching courses of pre-service teachers.
Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work: During the past decade, the process of teacher education reform has always been linked with the acquisition of practical knowledge of pre-service teachers. Looking at the representation of practical knowledge at the beginning phase of teacher professional development, that is, digging out the essence of the complex composition of teachers’ occupation, this can help us to more clearly define the direction of teacher training and the direction of teacher education.

Authors

• Xuehan Lv, College of Education, Zhejiang University

• Ge Wei