Maria Knobelsdorf, University of Dortmund, Germany - Didaktik der ...

include learners’ perspectives. While talking about Teacher
Education, the teacher himself becomes the learner. This
implies that teachers’ perspectives have to supplement the
content given by the educational concepts. Teachers’ perspectives
of planning lessons in CS are based on their subjective
theories. Based on Kelly [5] and Groeben [4] we define
subjective theories as individual cognitive structures of
self- and worldviews that have the function to explain and
to predict.
This model must be understood as an iterative one. The
educational concepts have to be structured anew once the
subjective theories of teachers are known. Similarly the subjective
theories can be understood better, if the educational
concepts are used as an aid. When developing guidelines for
teacher training one has to make sure that these educational
concepts and subjective theories are taken into account.
Therefore, there are several steps to achieve the goal of
creating guidelines for Teacher Education in CS. In the following
chapter we show by the design of our investigation
how we will achieve it.
3. EXPLORING TEACHERS’ SUBJECTIVE
THEORIES
The intention of this study is to explore subjective theories
of CS teachers on planning CS lessons. The method we used
was a semi-structured guided interview. For our aim it is
important to detect a wide range of subjective theories of
CS teachers, which calls for a qualitative research approach.
In order to increase the quality of the answers and for a
better comparison we decided to do the investigation on a
specific topic. For several reasons we decided on the topic
of networks and the Internet. This topic does not only have
high relevance in students’ everyday life [8], but the idea
of communication is one of Dennings’ principles [1] and it is
also mentioned in the Education Standards for CS published
by the German Association of CS [3]. Additionally, students’
perspectives have been investigated lately on this topic [2]
and we can use these results for our investigation.
In the following chapter we will describe the structure of
the interview and the sample.
3.1 The Structure of the Interview
For the collection of data we chose a semi-structured guided
interview. This means that there are set questions, but
they may be asked in a different order or put in a different
way. During the interview a communicative confirmation
took place. The interviewer repeated the given answer in
his own words and asked the teacher if he had understood
him correctly.
As an introduction we asked the teacher how he or she
had planned the past school year. This question does
not only provide an overview of the topics the teacher has
taught in the past year, but it directs the focus on the (professional)
expertise of the teacher. In addition, this question
shows how the teacher plans other topics in CS and thereby
helps to generalize the results of this study.
In the following, questions were asked about the planning
of lessons on the Internet. Therefore we asked
if this topic has been taught, and how relevant this topic
is. Afterwards we asked in which grade they would teach
this topic and which contents it would contain. Questions
on the learning objectives, the used methods and materials
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followed. We will come to the answers of this section later.
The next set of questions concerned students’ perspectives.
Teachers were asked for their assessment of their
students’ understanding of the functioning of the Internet.
They were also asked if they considered it important to
know their students’ perspectives and which part this aspect
played in planning the lessons. Since during a previous pretest
most teachers had not been able to imagine students’
perspectives, the interviewer read a student’s statement on
how the internet works [2] to them.
The following questions focus on the other subjects of
teachers because a teacher in Germany normally teaches
two subjects and not just one like in many other countries.
With these answers we understand better in which ways CS
differs from other subjects in the teachers’ perception. This
might be important for the concepts for teacher training.
The interview ends with questions about the teachers’
biography. After describing the methods for the data collection
we will go on to give some information about the
sample.
3.2 The Sample
For the aim of discovering different subjective theories
of CS teachers on planning lessons, not the frequency is
important but the variety of theories. Our focus was on
questioning teachers with possibly different subjective theories.
Therefore, we selected teachers with varying experience,
those who had been teaching for thirty years and
others who had just started a few weeks before.
We also interviewed teachers with different qualifications.
Some of them had an official certificate for teaching CS,
others just taught the subject because they were interested
in it or because they have been asked to. Not all teachers
had studied CS at university.
We also took the different school types in Germany into
account and chose teachers from all types of secondary schools
in which CS is being taught. All these characteristics led
to a heterogeneous group of fifteen teachers whose different
subjective theories we set out to examine.
3.3 Evaluation of the Interviews
The interviews took place in school and were recorded.
All interviews were transcribed. The transcription only included
the spoken word without showing differences in intonation.
We considered this way of transcription sufficient
for our objective. The transcribed interviews were analyzed
in several steps. First they were coded with the method
of qualitative content analysis [7]. In a first step the categories
of codings were built in a deductive way from the
interview structure. The second coding was an inductive
one. Therefore the given categories from the interview were
supplemented by new categories, taken from the data.
In the following, the results of this two first coding steps
are shown.
4. DIFFERENT WAYS OF PLANNING
LESSONS
In the following we describe the different approaches to
teaching the topic networks and the Internet.
4.1 Reasons for the Topic
Most of the interviewed teachers did not handle this topic
in class or only included some aspects of it in lessons on some