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54 EINBLICKE
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content knowledge. Countries like Switzerland, where accu-
mulating further education credits even during the holidays is
seen as perfectly natural, serve as a good example here. How
can teachers be encouraged to see their pre-service education
at college or university and their in-service education as a
consistent continuum? Which conditions need to be met for
courses in the tertiary, in-service phase, to be considered a
valuable experience?Which concepts for in-service education
are promising? Oldenburg’s educational researchers at the
university‘s Oldenburger Fortbildungszentrum (OFZ) as one
center for in-service teacher education are seeking answers
to these questions.
One tool that aids research into life-long teacher education is the
Universityof Oldenburg‘sTeaching-Learning-Laboratories (OLE-
LA).The primary purpose of these laboratories is to research the
processeswhenperforming experiments in the STEM-subjects.
In the past decade several hundred so-called "student labora-
tories" have been set up by industrial companies, science cen-
ters, research
institutes and
universities.The
idea is that the
learning pro-
cess shouldbemore free and independent here than in schools
because students work with greater motivation and interest in
these labs.There arehowever only a fewreliable studies that do-
cument this impact on learning. In the coming years,research at
theOldenburgTeaching-Learning-Laboratorieswill be aimedat
analysing the learning processes that take place in the student
laboratory and describing them in detail - and the hope is that
if possible this will be followed up in the humanities as well.
The Teaching-Learning-Laboratories are also being used to
examine the ways in which pre-service teachers motivate
students when performing experiments, how they identify
the associated learning processes and how they encourage
learning.
Methods of investigation like the teaching experiment, in
combination with interviews and the analysis of video foota-
ge come into play here. Of special interest from the point of
view of domain-specific research are the learning processes
of pre-service teachers whose early contact with their "target
group" causes them to question and sometimes revise their
initial ideas about how students work and learn. In a project
this research concept is being extended to the second phase
of teacher education (so called Referendariat).
The Teaching-Learning-Laboratories can also be used for in-
service teacher education courses and research into these
courses because here teachers have a different kind of access
to students than they would in schools. Investigating what
teachers themselves learn here, in other words focusing on
"professional learning", is a new perspective for Oldenburg.
Oldenburg projects such as the "Context Projects", "Energy
Education" or the Oldenburg team research have laid impor-
tant groundwork for research into how teachers learn.
Christina Huff and Larissa Greinert are busy preparing for
the next day in the Teaching-Learning-Laboratory. A class of
fourth-year students from Oldenburg has registered to work
there. They want to investigate whether wind turbines with
four rotor blades are more effective than ones with three
blades, and how to store electricity with a fuel cell. This is an
ideal opportunity for teacher students to observe how they
themselves teach and how their students learn.
A change of perspective is needed
−away fromteaching-oriented lessons,
towards learning-oriented lessons.
Strommessung im Schülerversuch:
„Was lernen Lehrer selbst dabei?“
Measuring current in a school experiment:
"What do teachers learn in the process?"