Mari Karm, Anu Sarv, Airi Niilo, Ene Voolaid, Merje Miliste, James Groccia
Learning-centered approach to teaching and active student engagement becomes more and more valued in universities. Therefore, the goal of pedagogical courses should be supporting the development of learning-centered teaching. Åkerlind (2007) supports the position that the focus of teaching improvement is influenced by the teacher’s conception of teaching. If the teacher holds a content-centered approach, particular strategies are used to build up better content knowledge. On the contrary, in the learning-centered approach the purpose of teaching is to improve student learning and an emphasis is also placed on continuous improvement of one’s own teaching (Postareff & Lindblom-Ylänne, 2008, Eley, 2006).
Studies show that teaching conceptions are not stable and change during the teaching experience (Kugel 1993). When examining the impact of pedagogical training of university teachers, it has been found that teaching conception of teachers who participated in longer teacher training courses changed towards a more student-centered approach (Postareff et al. 2007, Gibbs & Coffey 2004).
Acting as academic developers, we aim to support the development of learning-centered approach to teaching in our training courses. However, we lack the evidence how efficient our teaching in such training courses is to achieve these purposes and whether the activities and tasks in the courses support the change towards learning-centered approach to teaching.
This was a reason to carry out a qualitative study among three groups of university teachers participating in a long-term pedagogical training (6 ECTS) course during 2016-2018. Data was collected from the participants at the beginning and at end of the course. The participants were asked to write answers to open questions about their planning of teaching, their teaching methods or activities, the assessment strategies and methods in their teaching practice, and how they understand teaching and learning before and after the course. The texts were analyzed with qualitative content analysis and discourse analysis.
Preliminary results show that the conceptions of teaching that concern the teaching and the teaching methods used are richer in details at the end of the course rather than at the beginning of the course. The teachers evaluated most highly the practical tasks that gave them experience about different teaching methods. The teachers reported that reading articles about teaching influenced their thinking as teachers. Peer observations of teaching as a part of their pedagogical training were described as most influential in their everyday practice as teachers.
