Experience in the field is a major factor in teacher education around the world (Darling-Hammond, 2017). A practicum in a school gives pre-service teachers the opportunity to transfer the technology knowledge they gain during their higher education and apply this to their teaching practice. However, the role of a mentor teacher in a practicum is critical. If the mentor teacher does not provide a positive model, pre-service teachers cannot develop strong self-efficacy beliefs and might be discouraged from employing technology in their future daily teaching (Bullock, 2004). Missing self-efficacy beliefs are one of the major obstacles to implementation of effective technology instruction in schools (Elstad & Christophersen, 2017; Han, Shin, & Ko, 2017). Unfortunately, Switzerland does not yet have enough experienced technology teachers who can serve as good models for the integration of technology in lessons (Prasse, Döbeli Honegger, & Petko, 2017). How might this lack of fruitful practicum experience in relation to technology be addressed?
Our project offers a solution to this problem. In our region, a new centre for teacher education in technology has recently been opened. It is unique in its form, as it is embedded within an incubator for start-up enterprises in the technology field. Teachers and school students can get a taste of the real world of technology while they learn – applying their acquired technology skills in an authentic science-related environment. To make the learning of students and practitioners more beneficial, we intend to employ pre-service teachers as assistants during the problem-solving sequences of design tasks. For future teachers, this situation would have many benefits. They can profit from the opportunity to use technology in an authentic learning environment; a pedagogical model that will promote effective learning – particularly relevant in terms of the technology competences which will be required under the new curriculum 21. Furthermore, pre-service students can experience how technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK) looks in practice (Mishra & Koehler, 2006). In short, instead of going into schools for their technology practicum (which are not yet available in sufficient quantity and quality), pre-service teachers can assist teacher trainers with delivery of technology courses to classes. This is a completely new concept for stimulating and promoting digital transformation in schools. It must be borne in mind, however, that as yet there is a lack of knowledge about whether such an approach is really successful. It is, therefore, important to explore and prove the effects of our project.
Based on a quasi-experimental control group research design, we aimed to test whether “assisting” teachers develop, over time, more self-efficacy beliefs and TPCK than pre-service teachers in a control group. The intervention sample consisted of 13 pre-service teachers, each of whom assisted three times during a one-day course for secondary school classes during the 2020, start 2021. Hence, the duration of the project was one year. A larger sized sample served as the control group, consisting of pre-service teachers who only possessed theoretical knowledge gained from the school of education. To answer the hypothesis, we analysed quantitative data derived from a questionnaire. An extension of this research (but beyond the scope of the current project) would be to consider exploring the assisting teachers’ ability to transfer their acquired TPCK to their own classrooms.
