Workshop 1: Planning our Teaching

How do we plan our seminars?

In the following we would like to present how we develop our seminars when we think about developing our future science teachers` competences to deal with heterogeneous classes in their future.

Different dimensions of Diversity Wheel

Our students bring different dimensions in our classes. Those are presented in a Diversity Wheel. Most of those we don’t even notice but they are there and influence our students learning in general and science in particular.

Here you can find more information about diversity wheel

The majority of our university students (about 98%) went to academic track school during their whole primary and secondary education. Thus, most of our students never experienced high heterogeneous classes. One of the studies showed that for our groups of students, heterogeneity and diversity means that students can get different marks in chemistry. Different dimensions of diversity were not present in their schools, and if present then not noticeable.

Discuss in your team: What about your future science teachers? Are they aware of the different dimensions of diversity and how this may influence science teaching?

Thus, our seminars are planed in three steps: In the last years, we worked on different methods for making our students sensitive for different dimensions of diversity.

In this publication you can find some methods, for the three named steps.