Teaching development grants final and financial report: Practicing what one preaches: Using key learning principles to foster constructivist epistemic beliefs for theory-practice integration

Pre-service teachers have learnt many important concepts in education throughout their years of study and training; however, true impact only occurs when they demonstrate theory-practice integration. The present project designs a class with the use of key learning principles to foster constructivist epistemic and teaching beliefs among a group of pre-service teachers. The project also aims at identifying critical incidents of the pedagogical design from the students’ perspective in order to inform and strengthen future designs and generalizations. Specifically, the four fundamental learning principles (activating prior knowledge, cultivating metacognitive abilities, providing collaborative learning opportunities and teaching with big ideas) grounded on the emerging field, Learning Sciences, will be used to design the course; while these learning principles will also be taught as content. It is expected that through first-hand experiencing the principles as process; and learning the learning principles as content, students will demonstrate greater propensity for theory-practice integration. Students’ epistemic beliefs and conceptions of teaching were measured both at the beginning and at the end of the course to allow comparison. Furthermore, selected students were invited to attend an in-depth interview regarding their perception of critical incidents in the course that best help them learn.