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Science Teacher Training in an Information Society
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Guide

Introduction
About the workshops
Rationale
Structure
Notes on activities

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The rationale of the workshops

Teachers’ decisions about what they do in their classrooms are dependent on a variety of factors, which can be usefully summarised under the following four headings:
  • Content – includes the content of the proposed innovation and the content of the existing curriculum, and the perception of the teacher about how the new relates to the old.
  • Beliefs about learning – include what teachers think that they ought to be doing to support pupils in the classroom, what pupils find easy or difficult and why, and the role and nature of motivation.
  • Values – include what teachers believe about the nature of their subject, about the purposes of education, about their own role as a teacher, and so on.
  • Contexts, customs and constraints – includes a wide range from local factors such as classroom layout or the availability of resources, to more global factors such as prescriptions laid down by government, as well as teachers’ knowledge of the subject they are teaching, their repertoire of pedagogic strategies, their social skills, and so on
The training materials are modest in scope, and can have only limited impact on these factors. What can be done in these materials, however, is to make teachers aware of some ways in which the curriculum is transformed in implementation, and how these factors affect the transformations that teachers make.

The training materials should have some small impact on teachers’ capabilities, and they may have a role in helping them to change some of the contextual factors within which they work, though the materials are unlikely to have any major effect on teachers’ values. The materials should however help in making these factors explicit so that teachers can make informed choices in their implementation of new ideas.

If teachers are to be able to make explicit the factors that inform their decisions, they need to do this in the context of their own teaching. Training which is divorced from their own practice is unlikely to have long term consequences. The materials therefore use an approach in which there is an initial and final training session, with a period of some weeks in between in which teachers can use the ideas in their own practice.
 
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