A new learning community for educating future teachers: online baboratory school

Abstract

To provide quality mathematics education for disadvantaged groups of middle school students and continue to offer quality practicum experience to future teachers during the Covid 19 outbreak, we founded the Online Laboratory School. This school was free and open to public school students: 130 middle school students throughout Turkey attended for a 5-week period. There were 25 pre-service teachers actively involved in teaching, under the close supervision of 7 university supervisors. The entire gamut of planning, teaching and reflection sessions for each virtual class were recorded via an e-learning platform. Additionally, survey data was collected from the participating students, parents, pre-service teachers and supervisors. Our findings indicate that we were able to build a unique and virtual learning community. While pre-service teachers and middle school students benefited the most, university supervisors also reported improving their skills on when and how to give feedback. We describe how the school functioned and the range of opportunities it provided to all participants considering situated-learning perspectives and building online-learning communities. We also discuss how this model can be used in the future as a strong asset for teacher education programs and adaptation of fieldwork practices.