Design of a pre-service teacher training unit to promote scientific practices. Is a chickpea a living being?

Abstract

In this paper, we present the design of a teacher training sequence, emphasizing supporting pre-service teachers to reflect on their knowledge, skills, and emotions experienced when engaging in scientific practices. We consider such reflections being crucial in initial teacher training because they can make pre-service teachers aware of the cognitive, procedural and emotional process that their students are bound to experience in the class. The importance of this work lies in the fact that emotions, even though important, are relatively underexplored. Furthermore, the way the sequence is developed can be used with students, both to promote scientific practices and explore their emotions, to give evidence to pre-service teachers of the effectiveness of this, and make them reflect on how scientific practices work, and the advantages of learning science implementing scientific practices.