Cooperative Planning Conversations in the Teaching Practicum of Future German Teachers (KOPPRA-D)

The KOPPRA-D project analyses the domain-specific planning processes of students who want to become teachers of German language and literature (L1). The corpus consists of 28 planning conversations (including written lesson plans) conducted by pre-service teachers at the University of Jena (N=14), which were videotaped at the beginning and the end of the teachers’ five-month teaching practicum. The project is concerned with two major research goals. First, the project aims to use content analysis to identify what types of (domain-specific) knowledge appear in planning conversations. Second, the project will apply conversation analysis to describe how such conversations are structured and which communicative practices are used by the pre-service teachers. By accomplishing these research goals, we hope to shed light on the more general question of whether pre-lesson conferences among peers are a suitable means of enhancing domain-specific reflections in the teaching practicum.