This article proposes a new research approach to teachers' lesson planning. While numerous guidelines have been dominating lesson planning as an object of teacher education, we utilize teacher cognition and expertise research to view lesson planning from a different perspective: We argue that lesson planning typically demands specific cognitive skills that teachers must master to create high quality instructional practice. The so-called CODE-PLAN model (cognitive demands of lesson planning) forms the general theoretical framework for our conceptualization of six demands (content transformation, task creation, adaptation to student learning dispositions, clarity of learning objectives, unit contextualization, and phasing) to empirically describe and analyze teachers' planning competence. We investigate how these demands are met through content analysis of 337 plans for demonstration lessons written by teacher candidates during induction in Germany. Statistical findings on the construct, curricular, and predictive validity of planning competence measures show that the CODE-PLAN model may open new empirical research perspectives on teacher planning competence and stimulate curriculum design in teacher education.
In this article, we analyse pre-service language teachers' written plans for demonstration lessons in Germany. Our objective is to reconstruct and quantify generic and subject-specific planning decisions related to adaptive teaching, specified as the ways in which a lesson's main task fits the learning group's cognitive level. The focus is on aspects of generic planning featured in subject specific planning rather than very specific subject planning that reflects the unique aspect of that particular subject discipline. The sample comprises pre-service teachers during induction, surveyed at two time points. The findings show that planning skills can be measured in a reliable way and that subject-specific decisions are more difficult to implement into planning than generic decisions. Skills increase substantially during induction and can be explained by institutional and individual factors using regression analysis. Implications for the design of learning opportunities in teacher education and perspectives for future research are discussed.
Lesson planning of teachers as a research field has received little attention in terms of modelling and measuring relevant competences. As an innovative measurement approach, we developed a standardised method for analysing written plans of demonstration lessons. Our focus is on the demand of pedagogical adaptivity, i.e., the ways in which lesson assignments fit with the cognitive level of learners so that they are guided into their zone of proximal development. This conceptualisation is operationalised by using several indicators (content analysis criteria) to reconstruct and quantify situation-specific planning perception, interpretation, and decision-making. We use the data from 172 preservice teachers in Germany with their first demonstration lesson during induction. Findings show their declarative general pedagogical knowledge of adaptivity (assessed via a standardised test) is a significant predictor for the situation-specific skill of pedagogical adaptivity in written lesson plans, and the latter effects preservice teachers' self-reported instructional practice of teaching that lesson. Findings are discussed towards their implication for the design of teacher education.
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