DEVELOPING PRESERVICE SCIENCE TEACHERS’ PEDAGOGICAL CONTENT KNOWLEDGE THROUGH REFLECTION ON LESSON PLANNING

Abstract

Reflection is one of the subjects most discussed in teacher development. Despite its importance in improving teacher practices, reflection has been found to be contentious amongst teachers who battle with high workload and the need to complete the curriculum in time for examinations. Thus, said reflection can be viewed as a chore to most teachers particularly preservice teachers who not only need to master the pedagogical knowledge and subject matter knowledge but also classroom management techniques amongst other skills. The current paper reports on a study on how lesson planning was used as a tool to develop preservice teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge through reflection. In a qualitative case study, 50 Bachelor of Education Life Sciences students in their final year of study were each tasked to identify their ‘best’ lesson plan and ‘worst’ lesson plan and critically reflect on why they considered the lesson plans that way. These lesson plans had been designed and taught in schools during schoolwork experience (herein referred to as work integrated learning (WIL) in the first half of the year. Data was obtained from each participant’s submission of the two lesson plans and the reflection, which were then subjected to content analysis. The following aspects about lesson planning were considered: knowledge of the content to be taught, knowledge of the learners including classroom context, formulation of objectives, designing of teaching and learning strategies and activities, assessment opportunities, planning for technology use, and the student’s ability to realise good and bad practices in lesson planning. Thereafter they were tasked to plan and teach in their last seven weeks of WIL. The findings showed how the preservice teachers were determined to improve their lesson planning as they included in their reflections how they could plan and teach the same lesson differently including the so-called best lesson plan. Preservice teachers used words such as deficit, unstructured, misaligned, unattainable, not well thought out, to critique their lesson plans. Creativity as an aspect of the teacher skills set was evident in the way these 21st century teachers conceptualised how science should be taught. There were however some who failed to identify obvious weaknesses or strengths in their lessons plans, which showed stagnancy in development. The findings provide implications for teacher professional development practices