PlanvoLL-D

The Role of Professional Knowledge of Pre-Service German Teachers in their Lesson Planning: Validation and Methodological Innovation

Abstract

PlanvoLL-D aims at investigating the relation of professional knowledge pre-service German teachers acquire in their university education (first phase of teacher preparation) and a core requirement of their practical training (second phase): lesson planning.

PlanvoLL-D relies on two previous studies. In the "Teacher Education and Development Study: Learning to Teach" (TEDS-LT; funded by the BMBF), reliable tests were designed which measure content knowledge (literary and linguistic knowledge), pedagogical content knowledge (literary and linguistic pedagogical knowledge), and general pedagogical knowledge (Bremerich-Vos & Dämmer, 2013; König et al., 2013). It remains an open question whether the competences the future teachers gain in their university education determine their professional development in the second phase of training and therefore possess predictive validity for their further competence development. Lesson planning of teachers as a research field has received little attention so far in terms of modelling and measuring relevant competences. In a second previous study we used an innovative approach to measure planning competence: In "Planungskompetenz von Lehrerinnen und Lehrern" (PlanvoLL; König et al., 2015), we developed a standardized method for analyzing written lesson plans which highlights the demand of pedagogical adaptivity. Since this measures the pedagogical adaptivity of teacher trainees as a crucial aspect of their planning competence irrespective of their subject, in PlanvoLL-D, we refine the approach by applying it to German as a specific subject.

Aims

The project PlanvoLL-D aims at investigating the relation of professional knowledge pre-service German teachers acquire in their university education (first phase of teacher preparation) and a core requirement of their practical training (second phase): lesson planning. Professional knowledge comprises content knowledge (CK), pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), and general pedagogical knowledge (GPK), i.e., three major cognitive components of professional competence of teachers (Baumert & Kunter, 2006).

We hypothesize that professional knowledge of pre-service German teachers has predictive validity for their general and subject-specific lesson planning skills (planning competence) in the second phase of teacher preparation. While knowledge is defined as “cognitive disposition” and captured via standardized paper-pencil tests, lesson planning will be considered as “situation-specific skill” (cf. Blömeke, Gustafsson, & Shavelson, 2015) and measured according to an innovative approach of analyzing written plans of demonstration lessons (“Lehrproben”), i.e., typical work samples (Audit-Report on Funding Initiative, p. 14).

To our knowledge, this research question has not been investigated by empirical competence research yet. Following reform debates on teacher education in Germany – on the coherent structure of first and second phase, on the orientation towards teaching practice, on the support of cumulative learning of student teachers – PlanvoLL-D is considered to provide significant findings on the development of teacher preparation at university. Subsequently, our utilization concept aims at concrete measures to transfer project findings to current challenges on designing and evaluating extended forms of teaching practice at university.

Project data