Planning for teaching a genetics course to pre-service teachers: Experiences of a biology teacher educator

Abstract

There is limited evidence of guidelines for planning for teaching at the higher education level either in the research literature or in higher education institutions themselves. As a result, novice lecturers struggle to plan for their teaching. The purpose of this study was to explore how planning can be done at a higher education institution by documenting the process of planning of a genetics course for teaching pre-service teachers. A self-study methodology was employed and multiple forms of data were collected including pre- and post-testing results, interviews and journal entries of reflections with critical friends on the different forms of data. Reflections and journaling were ongoing processes throughout the study. The study revealed that planning effectively for teaching at higher education institutions requires lecturers to consider pre-service teachers’ multiple identities, which include pre-service teacher as a learner, a teacher and a member of society. These identities gave meaning and significance to the content that I presented to the students and impacted their learning. This study also revealed that the use of a framework such as the topic-specific Pedagogical Content Knowledge framework with its five components of learners’ prior knowledge, curricular saliency, what is easy or difficult to teach, representations and conceptual teaching strategies results in structured and informed planning for teaching at university level, contributing to transformation of the content knowledge into a form that is understandable to the students.

Keywords:

• Pre-service teachers
• planning
• self-study
• genetics
• TSPCK

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Eunice Nyamupangedengu http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2338-8012

Anthony Lelliott http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6424-5953

Notes

1. The term critical friend describes someone who can listen to a researcher’s account of practice and will critique the researcher’s thinking behind that account by mediating, provoking and supporting new understandings (Kemmis & McTaggart, 1992).