It’s a change of direction halfway through their Master’s degree – for some, a leap into the deep end: 275 teacher-training students are currently completing their teaching placement at primary, secondary and lower secondary schools in the region. Several days a week, they are now teaching instead of attending seminars and lectures.
The start was ‘no walk in the park’, as Nina Deeken (23) and Nico Noltemeyer (26) agree: there was just one weekend between the end of lectures in the winter term and the start of their teaching placements at their respective schools for the second half of the school year. Term holidays? Not a chance. Instead, they started off ‘juggling’ between university and school, sitting their final written exams – and, during the pupils’ Easter holidays, still having to complete their own seminar paper.
“Luckily, I was able to ease into it and spend the first two weeks observing lessons before I started teaching my own classes,” says Nina, who is studying German and Protestant religious education. She has now long since settled into ‘her’ primary school: ‘For half a year, I’ve been part of this school, part of the teaching staff; I’m fully immersed, I have my own spot in the staff room, and the classes know me.’
Nico, a trainee teacher of Protestant religious education and economics at secondary schools, who is completing his practical placement at a secondary school, has had a similar experience. “Basically, you’re a teacher at this school.” Even if it’s ‘only’ for half a year: he works closely with his pupils and has also sat in on lessons taught by different teachers in other subjects to get to know the young people and their learning styles.
Teaching at least two hours per week in each subject, preparing their own lesson plans, and carrying out a small research project on school practice alongside this: all of this has been part of the Master’s programme for trainee primary, Hauptschule and Realschule teachers for about three years now, following the extension of the programme from two to four semesters. GHR300 is the code name: the acronym comprises the initial letters of the three school types – and the requirement set by the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs that students must have earned 300 credit points to qualify for the ‘Master of Education’ degree. Since then, students have been able to earn part of these credits through the new practical placement block, which has been significantly extended to 18 teaching weeks, alongside preparatory, accompanying and follow-up courses.
“It’s a great opportunity,” says Jana-Katharina Dressler, a research assistant at the Centre for Didactics (diz), who analysed the learning processes of trainee chemistry teachers during the practical placement in her doctoral thesis. “Students gain an in-depth insight into school life whilst still studying.” However, she adds that the quality does not automatically improve simply because of the length or quantity of the practical elements. At least in her study, only a few students were able to use the practical placement to link the theoretical content of their training more closely with school practice.
Theory thought to be useless turns out to be helpful in practice
Nina, on the other hand, “came across things during my placement that I’d thought at university: ‘I’ll probably never need these again!’” For example, when it came to reading comprehension – that is, understanding the content of a text – in German lessons. She had still regarded the various models for this as useless theory in her second semester – “but now they’ve actually helped me”. Nico also noted: “There were some aspects of my degree that prepared me well for practical work, and others from which I was able to take away less concrete, applicable knowledge.”
However, says the 26-year-old, it’s hardly possible to have covered everything in terms of pedagogy, didactics and specialised subject knowledge after a bachelor’s degree and a master’s semester, and to be prepared for every situation and subject-related question as a teacher. “But I’m realising during the practical placement what I still need to work on.” Nina adds: “And there’s also a positive side to the fact that, as a teacher, you have to receive further education.”
Getting to know one’s own strengths and weaknesses, and seeing “what I still need to work on” – for diz staff member Dressler, that is precisely one of the aims of the practical placement. “I’m working on supporting these self-reflective processes even better.” As such, the diz is planning new interdisciplinary courses from the coming winter semester onwards to further improve students’ learning during the practical placement.
The aim is simply to show “what the profession will be like later on, what to expect during the teaching traineeship – to provide a more detailed insight into a teacher’s duties”. And the practical semester offers students the chance to try their hand at teaching in the classroom whilst still within the “safe space of the university”, according to Dressler: ultimately, the supervising teacher retains responsibility for the success of the lessons; “during the teaching practice, you’ll be teaching partly on your own”.
Nico sees the practical phase as an opportunity to cement his ambition to become a teacher and to gain experience. However, he feels – and this is also the case with his fellow students – that everyone quickly adapts to the circumstances at hand. “You no longer question things so deeply or look at them from an academic perspective: what is the school system, what could perhaps be improved, what would I like to do differently – I think we sometimes lack that perspective.” In this regard, too, he would like to see more reflection, “so that later on, when we have more say in shaping schools, we can actually take action”.
Nina, too, sometimes wonders how theory could be translated even more effectively into school practice. “When we discuss in the German support seminar that something isn’t quite right in the lessons – dictations, for example – that doesn’t automatically filter through to the schools.”
Burning bin: a moment of panic in a chemistry lesson
Speaking of getting to school: both students find the level of travel required for their teaching placements difficult. Given the sometimes long distances involved, coupled with irregular bus or train services, the assigned school location turns out to be a challenge in terms of time, organisation and also finances for some of their fellow students. “Perhaps that’s the budding economics teacher speaking,” says Nico, “but I do see a need for intervention here: for the state, for example, to look into how travel costs could be reimbursed or an expense allowance paid.” After all, the trainees have a bachelor’s degree and would also be paid if hired as teaching assistants.
Both of them value the interaction with their mentors during their placements. Nina has “two absolutely brilliant mentors who are also very interested in what’s new at university at the moment”. They meet regularly after school to chat and exchange ideas. “We talk about pupils, for example, and I can tell that my opinion carries weight.” However, she has “also heard other stories from friends where things haven’t gone so well”.
The role of mentors is immensely important, as Jana-Katharina Dressler noted in her doctoral thesis. The students who were able to enhance their subject-specific teaching knowledge and their understanding of the diverse possibilities for lesson planning during their teaching placement benefited above all from so-called ‘model learning’ whilst observing lessons – in other words, from what they were able to learn by watching the teachers.
Conversely, Dressler noted that it had hindered students’ learning when they focused too heavily on themselves as lecturers and lost sight of the pupils’ perspective – and thus the pupils’ learning success. Key experiences had also narrowed the perspective of some students: for example, a chemistry student who, following a brief – and fortunately quickly extinguished – fire in a bin during a lesson, went on to give far more thought to the safety aspects of teaching than to anything else.
Nina and Nico may not have had such defining experiences yet, but Nina says, “Every day I have little ‘aha’ moments that reinforce my belief that I shouldn’t underestimate primary school pupils. Particularly in religious education, for instance when discussing charity, I often hear things from the children that make me think: ‘Wow, an adult would struggle to put that so succinctly.’ She finds it a shame that, after her work placement, she still has to wait a year before starting her teaching training. “I’d love to carry on straight away, but I’ll be heading back to uni soon,” she smiles: “It’s got to be done!”
