교사양성 교육과정 개발의 실제에 대한 내부자 연구

본 내부자 연구는 연구자가 미국 위스칸신 대학의 STEP 교사교육 교육과정 개발자로 참여하면서 얻은 실무적 경험은 물론 교육과정의 철학적 방향 설정까지 다룬 종합적이고 내러티브적인 사례 연구이다. 우선 목표설정의 단계에서 STEP 교육과정 개발자들은 직전 교사들의 인식론적·철학적 태도를 구성주의적 방향으로 교육시키고자 하였다. 둘째, 교육과정 개발의 단계에서는 직전 교사들에게 교육이론이라는 개념적 지식을 의미 있게 학습시키기 위해 교육학 이론에 나타나는 상이한 관점들과 다양한 실제 사례들을 제공하는 사례중심 교육과정(CBC)을 개발하였다. 셋째, 평가의 단계에서는 STEP 교육과정이 구성주의적 교사교육의 하나라는 인식하에, 직전 교사들의 가치 및 태도에 있어서 구성주의적이고 탐구지향적인 성취가 있었는지 평가해보았으며 그 결과를 이후 학기를 위한 교육과정 개선에 반영하고자 하였다.

This is an insider research on the Secondary Teacher Education Project(STEP), an innovative teacher education course that enables us to better accomplish our course goals than in a traditional learning environment. Above all, at the stage of setting course objectives, the curriculum of the STEP was aimed to promote the constructivist kinds of learning that result not in simple memorization of facts, but in enduring, useful, in-depth understandings of important education theories and learning science concepts. The STEP system follows the recommendation for instructional designs that provide learning community to help pre-service teachers develop constructivist philosophical and pedagogical concepts as to how to build classroom environments in their instructional practices.

In the process of curriculum development, I have found that this is a kind of learning that can only partially be accomplished by traditional forms of professional training, which tend to employ traditional methods of classroom instruction. Instead, the STEP instructional system scaffolds students-centered instruction in which small groups of students not only acquire but deepen their understanding of learning science concepts as they work together on instructional design problems and curriculum development. In line with CFT, we have designed the STEP course as a learning community which operates as a knowledge construction system that promotes a conceptual belief of the constructive nature of learning.

In order to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach with individual students, theories suggest that we need to know how much students′ own view align with a constructivist perspective as a result of the course. Therefore, the evaluative research was conducted to examine whether the STEP course attained these objectives. The SEM model I developed indicates that the researcher's hypothesized relationships among student beliefs and teaching philosophies is consistent with STEP curricular goals and the course philosophy. By confirming this model of factor structure, researchers could provide general guidelines for making the STEP curriculum more meaningful and pedagogic to help students acquire appropriate learning theory and problem-solving skills.