Abstract:
The present study was aimed to enhance sense of agency and pedagogical awareness and subsequent lesson quality during teaching practicum. A digital course with 9 lessons on various topics and e-learning activities that required reflective engagement of learners and professional dialogues with peers were developed. Whether it could be an effective intervention tool to promote student teachers’ agency beliefs and pedagogical awareness are yet to confirm. However, the survey results from the participating student teachers seemed to suggest a close relationship between their sense of agency and their adaptability and work experience at the schools during the teaching practicum. Thus, workplace context may affect agency, but whether it would affect teaching quality remains unclear.
Agency beliefs were measured by teachers’ control, agency, and means-ends belief questionnaire (Malmberg et al., 2004), but lesson quality by the Quality of Teaching Scale (van de Grift, 2007) was not adopted because we lacked videos to evaluate their on-site teaching performance. However, the effects of personal characteristics and contextual factors on observed lesson quality (e.g., emotional and instructional support, classroom organization, and students’ engagement) were investigated in our survey results as well as in our contacts with the students.
Code:
T0143
Principal Project Supervisors:
Keywords provided by authors:
- E-learning platform
- Agency belief
- Observed classroom quality
- pedagogical awareness
- individual difference
Subjects:
Start Date:
01 Jul 2014
End Date:
31 Dec 2015
Status:
Completed
Result:
A digital course with 9 lessons on various topics and e-learning activities that required reflective engagement of learners and professional dialogues with peers were developed. Whether it could be an effective intervention tool to promote student teachers' agency beliefs and pedagogical awareness are yet to confirm due to limited number of participants. However, the survey results from the participating student teachers seemed to suggest a close relationship between their sense of agency and their adaptability and work experience at the schools during the teaching practicum. Thus, workplace context may affect agency, but whether it would affect teaching quality remains unclear.
Specific observations included:
It was found that pre-service teachers' agency beliefs were more dependent on their work experience in the schools where they did their practicum.Those who felt that they were more competent and successfully accomplished in their work tended to have stronger agency beliefs in their classroom practices and capacities to provide students instructional and emotional supports. Sense of agency and feeling of accomplishment in practicum showed a reciprocal relationship in the regression analyses.
It was found that our pre-service teachers lacked meta-cognitive knowledge and this seemed to affect their pedagogical awareness.
It was also concluded that collectively their qualitative views would be more appropriate than quantitative data in promoting their teaching quality in practicum.
Impact:
This project made the following impact:
adding on an existing e-learning platform with 6 lectures on classroom observation training in various theoretical approaches (e.g., traditional, phenomenological, constructivist, social-constructivist, informational processing);
enhancing pre-service teachers' observed lesson quality in their lessons during teaching practicum by enrolling them in the digital course mentioned above;
enhancing pre-service teachers' sense of agency and pedagogical awareness through learning activities that require analyses and reflections of their and others' classroom observation clips:
Individual differences of pre-service teachers in their development of supportive and instructional agency through their online logs and questionnaires over eight months; and
Individual differences of pre-service teachers in their pedagogical awareness in their analysis of classroom processes.
Deliverables:
Teaching and Learning Resources/ Materials
PEERS Lessons and Learning, and Activities avaialble in Moodle
Financial Year:
2013-14
Type:
TDG