Professionalization in the teaching-learning lab

The research work was carried out as a sub-project (Prof. Dr. Volker Scheid, Dr. Andreas Albert and Dr. Tobias Hillebrand) in the context of ^PRONET2 (PROfessionalisierung durch VerNETzung - Fortführung und Potenzierung), with which the University of Kassel participated in the second funding phase of the Qualitätsoffensive Lehrerbildung (2019-2013). The dissertation by Tobias Hillebrand (2024) entitled Professionalization Processes in the Teaching-Learning Laboratory for Sports Education - An Empirical Study with Prospective Sports Teachers(https://kobra.uni-kassel.de/bitstream/handle/123456789/15595/DissertationTobiasHillebrand.pdf?sequence=3), which is presented below, was written as part of the sub-project .

With the conception and establishment of the Sports Education Teaching and Learning Laboratory, the Department of Education and Teaching at the Institute of Sport and Sport Science is pursuing the goal of subjecting teaching-relevant topics at university and school learning locations to pedagogical justification, didactic testing and joint reflection. Theoretical points of reference are, on the one hand, professional competence and, on the other, teaching quality. Pedagogical action should be based on scientific theories as well as personal experience. Therefore, the promotion of a scientifically reflective professional habitus through a close interlinking of theoretical content and teaching practice is the main objective of the work in the laboratory (see also the section on conception and application).

The aim of the research work is to enable student teachers to gain practical experience in a reflective context at an early stage through the institutionalization of the Teaching-Learning Laboratory for Sports Education and thus to offer high-quality teaching. The course is intended to promote the professionalization of the participating sports students; effects are expected in terms of professional knowledge, self-efficacy expectations and reflective performance.

The theoretical approach of the study is based on existing approaches to professionalization in teacher training and focuses on the model of professional competence (Baumert & Kunter, 2013). While teaching-learning labs have already established themselves as a new higher education didactic format in various teaching subjects in recent years (Bosse et al., 2020), only a few comparable labs exist in sports education to date. Accordingly, the findings on the effectiveness of these event formats in the subject are still limited.

To investigate these effects, a pre-post study design was chosen and used as part of the teacher training course. A total of 58 students from four seminars were included in two preliminary studies and 98 students from four seminar groups were examined in the main study. The analysis included questionnaires on the three facets of knowledge (pedagogical knowledge, subject-specific knowledge, subject-didactic knowledge) as well as on selected aspects of self-efficacy expectations with regard to teaching activities. Written reflections on a teaching video were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively using the ERTO model by Krieg & Kreis (2014) to record reflective performance.

The following conclusion can be drawn from the results of the study: Students in the teaching-learning lab record better results in the knowledge tests after attending the course and show more stable self-efficacy expectations than the subjects in the control group. There is no statistically relevant difference between the reflection performance of the laboratory and control groups (see also Albert, Scheid & Hillebrand, 2022; Scheid, Albert & Hillebrand, 2022).