“Diagnosis and Individual Support” is the name of a collaborative project in which the University of Bremen is participating with 2 sub-projects. The core idea: Learning a subject in social togetherness. The aim is to further improve the training of future teachers of STEM subjects at elementary- and secondary-level I schools with regard to dealing with heterogeneous groups. For the past two years, the Telekom Foundation has already been supporting two other Bremen research projects titled “Inclusive Mathematics Classes” and “Adapitivity of Chemistry and Mathematics Lessons”. The University of Bremen is participating in the collaborative development project “Diagnosis and Support of Heterogeneous Learning Groups” together with TU Dortmund (coordination) and the universities in Gießen and Oldenburg. The focus of the Bremen sub-project lies on intertwining study elements on subject-specific didactics and practical teaching in Mathematics and Chemistry.
Since February 18, 2016, the initial results – also those produced by the other two collaborative research groups funded by the Telekom Foundation – are available in an online magazine under www.mint-lehrerbildung.de. Education experts, teachers, and interested members of the public can access informative and entertaining stories, interviews, video clips and sound recordings. The online magazine is constantly updated over the course of the year.
Maths inclusive
The Bremen Professors Dagmar Bönig (Mathematics Didactics for Elementary School), Natascha Korff (Inclusive Pedagogy, Didactics) and Angelika Bikner-Ahsbahs (Teacher Training Mathematics for Secondary School I and II (Gymnasium / Oberschule) are all working in the project titled “Inclusive Mathematics Lessons”. Together with their students, they are developing teaching concepts that will allow all the pupils in a class, across all levels, to tackle the same mathematical tasks and concentrate together on the same topic. The didactical experts at the University of Bremen are particularly interested in developing their students’ awareness that inclusive learning means awakening and exploiting the different development potentials of pupils. Here, their students – future teachers – have a key role to play. During lessons they must react to their pupils’ contributions and support them by way of a targeted approach with directed tasks – in didactical jargon one speaks of emergent tasks – to make adequate learning progress. The trainee teachers then move on to gather practical teaching experience in Bremen schools. In the following semester spent at university, they evaluate this practical training in special courses that accompany their practical teaching semester. In the online magazine, Angelika Bikner-Ahsbahs explains the term “emergent task” on the example of a concrete teaching situation.
Adapting lessons to fit the pupils
“Adapitivity of Chemistry and Mathematics Lessons” is the title of the second sub-project at the University of Bremen which is led by Professor Christine Knipping (Didactics of Mathematics), Dr. Silvija Markic and Yannik Tolsdorf (both Didactics of Chemistry). The idea behind adaptive lessons is that the teacher determines what the pupils already know before moving ahead with new material: This means that the teacher must adapt to the pupils in a class, pick up on their ideas, and then together with the pupils develop lessons in accordance with subject-specific concepts. In didactics this is called diagnostic reconstruction. The teacher has to analyze and understand what individual pupils know about the learning topic before progressing to new didactically “customized” content. In highly heterogeneous learning groups it has proven successful when preparing lessons to introduce self-differentiating tasks in order to take into account the different levels and learning potentials of pupils. This project is also accompanied by subject-specific didactics courses in mathematics and chemistry during the semester of in-school practice.
Training good teachers
In the frame of the study program to improve teacher training in the STEM subjects Mathematics, Informatics, Natural Sciences and Engineering supported by the Telekom Foundation, Bremen is not alone in addressing the question: How to turn out good teachers capable of coping with a diverse and heterogeneous student body? The question is also being pursued by the other twelve universities taking part in the collaborative project. The online magazine (www.mint-lehrerbildung.de) will be constantly posting updates on the projects’ progress, concrete experiences, teaching successes, and even didactical dead-ends.
If you would like to have more information on this topic, please contact:
University of Bremen
Faculty Mathematics / Informatics
Work Group Didactics of Mathematics
Prof.Dr. Christine Knipping
Phone: +49 421 218-63720
email: knippingprotect me ?!math.uni-bremenprotect me ?!.de
www.telekom-stiftung.de
