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the content. In the natural sciences in particular, this causes
students to lose interest because the scientific language and
the scientific structuring of the knowledge are not adapted
to their way of thinking or interests. In addition pre-service
teachers try to teach in exactly the same way as they them-
selves were taught in school; educational researchers have a
saying for this: "Teachers teach as they were taught - and not
as they were taught to teach."
What is needed, therefore, is a development in the way tea-
chers think about teaching and learning, a change of their
perspective away from teaching-oriented lessons and towards
learning-oriented lessons. In this process top priority must
be given to finding out what incentives students need for
successful learning, which preconceptions they have about
topics taught in class and which learning processes they can
go through. How teachers can integrate all this effectively in
the design of their lessons andwhat they think of the learning-
oriented approach is the subject of the current domain-spe-
cific and general educational research, to which the students
Christina Huff and Larissa Greinert are also contributing.
In the past two decades students‘ conceptions and learning
pathways have been the subject of intense national and in-
ternational educational research. We now know a lot about
the importance of learning conditions and about stimulating
certain learning processes. Research into the ideas students
bring to the classroomhas for instance revealed that it makes
little sense to ask students to ignore their everyday precon-
ceptions in class, by telling them: "Forget your own ideas
about 'force';here youwill learnwhat physics has to say about
it." Such demands will not be met because preconceptions
are interpretative frameworks which have proven effective in
everyday situations or other contexts. They will only change
if the new, scientific concepts prove to be more useful and
convincing. Here, researchers have developed proposals for
how to develop students‘ conceptions and put them to fruitful
use in lessons.
The results of this research are too little known among te-
achers and are therefore only slowly being integrated into
teacher education. What is true for the students is also true
for the teachers. New concepts are only adopted if they fit in
with the pre-existing system of concepts or if reorganization
offers greater advantages. For this to happen, basic research
is required to determine what kind of pedagogical content
knowledge teachers have in different subjects,which subjec-
tive beliefs and attitudes prevail and how they influence and
control processes of designing classroom lessens.
In the graduate programme ProfaS at Oldenburg Univer-
sity, these questions
are being investigated
using the methods of
qualitative social re-
search.Twenty-one PhD
students are currently examining the processes of designing
lessons to provide a detailed picture of teachers‘ pedagogical
content knowledge.The research ranges from the analysis of
teachers‘ epistemological beliefs to their ideas about how to
conduct experiments in science classes to the use of texts in
German lessons.
The secondmajor challenge teachers face consists in learning
to see their own education as a life-long process that doesn‘t
end once they complete their pre-service education.Germany
in general lacks a culture of in-service teacher education that
encourages teachers to see the benefits of extending their
subject-specific knowledge and in particular their pedagogical
The driving force for
changes in lessons can only be
the teachers themselves.
Michael Komorek:„In Deutschland fehlt es an einer
Fortbildungskultur.“
Michael Komorek: "Germany lacks a culture of in-
service training."