All are different in a different way

Expedition: School
Project Name: FDQI-HU-MINT

Knowledge and education are among the most important resources for prosperity in Germany. And yet our school system leaves a considerable number of students behind. At Humboldt-Universität, teachers are to be prepared to teach in such a way that as many students as possible can develop their potential. Didactics experts at the Professional School of Education have developed a model for this purpose - and provide a practical tool in the form of an experimentation app.

Everyone is different in some way - that's a life lesson, but it is also the guiding principle of many teachers when they recognize the diversity of their student body. Girls and boys not only differ in gender, they also have different mother tongues and very different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to learning. Obviously, however, schools and teaching in Germany do not do justice to all children. Among 15-year-old students, one in five failed in basic skills in reading, math or science in 2018, according to the EU Commission in its indicators for sustainable development. A small proportion of students, as many as seven percent, even leave school without any educational qualifications at all.

Didactics experts develop an experimentation app, Photo: Falk Weiß

Whether children succeed at school also depends more on their parents' home in Germany than in other industrialized countries. Following numerous PISA studies, this has also been confirmed by the National Education Report 2020: Pupils who grow up in a family with a low income or whose parents have rather low educational qualifications have a hard time. Children of single parents and children whose parents have a migration background are particularly at risk.

School Subjects: The Starting Point for Equal Opportunities

How can a school ensure equal opportunities despite social differences? How can all students benefit from an education that enables them to develop their potential? The project Fachdidaktische Qualifizierung Inklusion angehender Lehrkräfte (FDQI-HU) (Didactic Qualification for Inclusion of Future Teachers) starts with the teachers and their subjects. During their studies, they should learn how to teach their subject inclusively, i.e. how to include as many students as possible. Academic coordinator Julia Frohn describes the approach as follows: "We are not interested in singling out students because of their special needs. We turn it around. We're asking: How can the subject and the subject matter be designed to allow learning at different paces, at different levels, and in different ways?" For Julia Frohn, who taught German until 2015, this means, for example, that she repeatedly creates points of contact for her students: for example, by having those who prefer drawing to writing reproduce a scene from the reading as a comic. Or by letting students help decide what they read in school. "In the best case, this ties in with the reality of the students' lives," says Frohn. It's worth taking the students' wishes seriously, and teachers can learn from them.

A model for inclusive teaching and learning: Proven concepts readjusted

This understanding of a reciprocal teaching and learning relationship in the classroom is reflected in the Didactic Model for Inclusive Teaching and Learning (DiMiLL), which the researchers from the disciplines of education, special education, language education, and didactics have developed for subjects such as history, industrial education, and English in the first phase of the project since 2016. It is intended to provide orientation and support for prospective teachers: for fundamental thinking about school, but also for concrete lesson preparation.

How does good teaching and learning work? Photo: Falk Weiß

(© Falk Weiß)

In developing this model, the educators did not start from the scratch. They drew on traditional educational ideas. For example, Wilhelm von Humboldt's idea that education is not just about teaching subject matter, but also about personal development. And they are based on proven didactic concepts such as communication and participation as core elements of teaching. For the model, all ideas and concepts were then oriented towards inclusive learning. For the planning of lessons, it follows that teachers, for example, align the content and methods more closely to the abilities and interests of the students and understand performance assessments not as an evaluation, but as part of a continuous learning process. "We want to show future teachers that inclusion is not magic; you can approach it quite systematically," says Julia Frohn. At the same time, she says, it has to be acknowledged that the conditions for implementation at schools are often not the best, because time and money - for example, for additionally required pedagogical staff - are often scarce.

An App supports learning in science and math

Teachers will be able to try out a very specific tool with their classes as early as in the 2021/22 school year: An app for teaching science that is specifically made to capture the volatility of teaching and learning processes. "We've noticed in classroom observations that when children are doing complex tasks such as modeling in math, they end up with solutions but can't understand how it was arrived at. Our app allows the solution process to be traced in small steps," says Dominik Bechinie, a doctoral student in math didactics and part of the six-member development team.

The app "Getch" supports learning, Photo: Falk Weiß

From trial and error to systematic learning

The app, called "Getch", allows students to record voice messages when an idea pops into their head while working on math and science assignments, or capture it as a text note. When experimenting, they can also take photos or videos to document individual steps. That's not all. The crucial thing is that all recordings and documents - whether pictures, notes or audios - can be merged and sorted on the app's desktop. This should help students to structure the path to a solution and make it comprehensible.

Dominik Bechinie's colleague uses an example from physics lessons to explain why this is so important. "Children go quite wild at first when they want to find out, for example, what the laws are behind the beam balance. They sometimes hang more or sometimes fewer weights on the scale," Stephen Mayer reports. In order for them to find their way out of this trial-and-error phase, they need support. "That's exactly what the app does by capturing photos and notes of the experimentation process and helping the students to systematize their observations."

An app for inclusive teaching must be designed to be as barrier-free as possible. Therefore, it uses fonts that are easy to read, the display is high-contrast, the menu structure is simple, and the use is intuitive. "You need no more than two clicks to get anywhere," promises Dominik Bechinie. This first basic version is the beginning. Step by step, the accessibility of the app is to be expanded, for example to include a read-aloud function, and its area of use is to be extended to include other school subjects.

"Teacher education without inclusion is no longer conceivable"

In parallel - the second phase of the project will run until the end of 2023 - Julia Frohn and her colleagues will expand the teaching and learning model and its individual components to include the didactics of science subjects and mathematics. In this way, student teachers of all subjects will be able to use the model to learn how to design inclusive teaching. This subject didactic perspective for inclusion will be taught primarily in the master's program.

Dr. Julia Frohn, photo: Falk Weiß

"Teacher training without inclusion is no longer conceivable," says Julia Frohn. "And for students at Humboldt University, courses on inclusive teaching and learning are now also mandatory. It's very important that this is codified." Other universities are not yet as far along. However, the teaching material that Julia Frohn and her team have developed for the training of future teachers is already available to everyone - since lectures and seminars were only held online due to the Corona pandemic, also in digital form.

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  • Keimende Pflanzen in der Stadt; Foto: Falk Weiß

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