Didactic double-decker for digital education in STEM fields (D4MINT)

 

To enable teachers to explore and exploit the opportunities offered by new digital forms of teaching and to overcome the associated challenges, the focus must now be on training these very teachers. According to the current state of research, this also requires new training formats that can support the majority of teachers on the path to digital education. RWTH Aachen University and the universities of Giessen, Oldenburg and Potsdam would like to make significant contributions to this for the STEM sector. The developed research program is based on well-founded and extensive preliminary work of various projects at the universities, which are fed by contributions from the subject didactics of all MINT subjects, educational sciences and media didactics and thereby combine expertise from the areas of elementary school, high schools and comprehensive schools as well as vocational colleges.

The project focuses on promising formats of teacher training (LFB) with the potential to be implemented quickly and broadly at the same time, and in whose development a sustainable anchoring in the educational landscape is considered from the beginning. LFBs in the style of "didactic double-deckers" were chosen as the focus of the joint project, as they are called for, for example, in the still young recommendations of the KMK on "Teaching and Learning in the Digital World" (2021). According to this, "such continuing education formats are to be strengthened that link subject-specific and didactic content with professional competence development in the sense of a "didactic double-decker"." (KMK, 2021). Such formats of didactic double-decker are implemented by us in various forms and their effectiveness is researched in a design-based-research approach using synergies in the network. Among other things, student teachers are also systematically in the offers of LFB and this constellation is designed as a win-win situation for all participants. The project covers the entire spectrum of STEM subjects, including mathematics, computer science, biology, chemistry, physics, physical education and technology. A special focus is on computer science, where a new compulsory subject meets a particularly large deficit of regularly trained computer science teachers. Another focus includes the beneficial embedding of Open Educational Resources (OER) in everyday school life. The project will also provide an evaluation tool for LFB.