Reflective teaching practice of future biology teachers from the point of view of observation interviews
Abstract
Reflective practice is an important part of a future teacher's training and the interviews between the student teacher and the supervisor play a key role during this practice. The article describes an analysis of interviews with pre-service teachers of biology conducted within the supervision process.
These interviews sought to establish which aspects of teaching the pre-service teachers were dealing with, which ones they tended to omit, and which ones they found challenging. We focused on subject-specific phenomena in biology lessons in five areas: teaching objectives, the scope and content of subject matter, selection and the procedure of working with teaching materials/aids, mistakes made by the preservice teachers and pupils, the popularity of topics and motivation.
The respondents of the research were pre-service teachers of biology (n = 35), who were in their follow-up master's degree program, completing their pedagogical practice at either lower or upper secondary schools. Most often the pre-service teachers set only cognitive objectives which were formulated primarily using the content of the curriculum.
Key competences and active verbs were only used in a limited extent when their objectives were being set. The scope of the curriculum was most often determined by the supervising teacher or the customary range taught in that particular school, while the presented organisms were most often determined by the textbook.
A large number of respondents were able to mention the specific mistakes they had made in the classroom, yet they did not comment on the pupils' mistakes, with one notable exception. The most common way of motivating pupils was using illustrations with various teaching aids.
We believe that the results can contribute to improving the preparation of pre-service biology teachers, especially in the field of interviews with supervisor conducted within the continuous teaching practice.