THE INFLUENCE OF THE COURSE OBSERVATION PRACTICE ON THE STUDENTS' ABILITY TO REFLECT ON THE OBSERVED LESSON

Abstract

A teacher's ability to reflect on teaching is one of the basic attributes enhancing the quality of educational process. The ability to adequately analyze educational situations by pre-service or novice teachers is essential not only for their future occupational decisions, but also for their own feedback.

One way to develop this ability is to deepen their professional vision. This paper focuses on mapping these competencies on pre-service chemistry teachers by analyzing their input and output reflections after attending the Observation Practice course.

This approach is one of the typical ways in which the current state of professional vision is mapped. The research was carried out in the winter semester 2018/2019.

The participants consisted of pre-service chemistry teachers (N = 12, an available sample) at the Charles University, Faculty of Education in the first year of the follow-up master's program. Respondents of the research individually reflected the video-lesson of one chemistry lesson at elementary school (theme - alkanes) at the beginning and at the end of the course (X/2018-I/2019).

Subsequent written reflections were analyzed by a self-constructed tool based on van Es and Sherin's methodology (2009). This was complemented by the Shulman-based model (Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK)) and set to the 3A methodology (Slavík et al., 2014) scheeme.

The results indicate that after completing the course, the students' ability to notice in the "actor" category moved from the teacher himself to describing the micro-situations of the teacher together with the students(s). At the same time, even after completing the course, students are still focusing on general pedagogical phenomena at the expense of subject (chemistry) itself and field-didactic.

In the output reflections, the quality of the students' ability to annotate deepened and at the same time a positive shift in terms of attempts to alter teaching situations was observed.