The Experimental Practical Course for Secondary and Lower Secondary Schools is aimed at students on the two-subject Bachelor’s degree programme in Physics, who are training to become teachers at secondary and lower secondary schools, usually in their 6th or 4th semester. It is offered each summer semester (currently one group with a maximum of 12 students). The module is worth 6 KP and consists of a three-hour weekly laboratory practical. The session always takes place on Fridays; attendance at all sessions is compulsory. If places remain available in a given intake beyond the group of students mentioned above, these are of course also open to students specialising in teaching at grammar schools.

The Experimental Practical Course for Secondary, Lower Secondary and Special Needs Schools builds on the Career-Oriented Experimental Practical Course (phy214), which should be completed beforehand. Here, students aiming to teach at Hauptschule and Realschule, having completed the basic practical course (phy211 and phy215), are given the opportunity to engage in-depth with physics topics with regard to their experimental demonstration and discussion, as well as their potential technical applications.

Questions regarding the didactic value of the experiment and its integration into teaching at Haupt-, Real- and Förderschule are specifically addressed and incorporated into the implementation of the experiments. Here, the experimental practical ties in with the module ‘Learning and Teaching Physics’ (phy260) and the ‘Vocational Experimental Practical’ (phy214) . By incorporating the learners’ perspectives, the focus is on the role of the experiment in developing experimental skills and gaining insights.

Direct contact with pupils is another key focus of the module. To this end, school classes are invited to the placement, where pupils work in small groups alongside the students to carry out experiments together. This gives students the opportunity to observe, at an experimental station they have designed themselves, how school pupils engage with the physics experiments and what learning processes they go through. Experiences from the module may be revisited in the Bachelor’s thesis and in the subject-specific didactics module phy410.

Students usually work in pairs and, as part of their assessment, produce reports that focus on the didactic perspective.

Michael Komorek