Disciplinary Model for Internship Workshops for Second-Career Physics Teachers – in Collaboration with Beit Berl College
Leading team
Project members
- Dr. Larisa Shakhman
- Esther Magen
- Ofer Ben Avraham
- Israel Magen
Summary
The project involves research based design of a novel model for disciplinary internship workshops for second-career Physics teachers. The disciplinary focus is in contrast to the traditional focus of internship workshops in Israel – serving teachers from a variety of disciplines, excluding physics-specific professional challenges that occupy novice teachers. The participants are second-career teachers coping both with a change in status, from accomplished experts in their previous careers to novice teachers, as well as novices struggling to maintain a sense of agency in their new job. Thus, there is an emphasis on providing a safe environment in the workshop, where teachers can share difficulties and dilemmas – a critical feature to support participants in building professional resilience. The model follows key design guidelines for disciplinary professional learning community:
a) Focus on student centered teaching strategies related to settings that are central for Physics teachers: the design of lessons and artifacts to promote learning goals related to problem solving and lab work – the cornerstones of physics learning.
b) Collaborative reflection on practice. One of the learning activities of the workshop is the “flagman cycle” involving a “flagman” documenting and sharing his/her classroom experience in turns (rotating between all workshop participants), peers providing feedback on the flagman documentation, and collaborative discussion – learning from peers successes and exploring pedagogical dilemmas that the flagman identified following their classroom experience.
c) Co-leading the workshop by two leaders bringing respective experiences: that of an expert physics teacher and that of a second career teacher. Two workshops (N=29) operate in 2020-21.
Research
Dr. Larisa Shakhman studies the project as part of her Post Doctorate study, supervised by Prof. Edit Yerushalmi, with a focus on the design of the internship workshop to strengthen teachers’ professional resilience. Specifically, the research goals are to:
- Identify design guidelines for an internship workshop model that develop professional resilience in Second-Career Physics Teachers, construct internship workshop activities to materialize the design guidelines and map the extent to which implemented workshop activities align with the design.
- Study changes in participants’ professional resilience in the context of problem solving in the Physics classroom:
- What role perception do teachers form in the context of problem solving?
- What challenges do teachers identify following their classroom experiences – materializing their initial role perception?
- How, if at all, did teachers find the collaborative reflection on practice as instrumental in coping with the challenges they identified
We thank the Mofet Institute and the Ministry of Education for their support.