Abstract
Educational news stories can provide teacher education students with the opportunities to understand educational contexts. However, teacher education students may be difficult to evaluate these stories in a realistic context due to a lack of sufficient educational experiences. If teacher education students have the opportunity to discuss the reported events of education news and to reflect on critical educational issues, they may uncover new understandings of education news stories. This study attempts to employ peer-led discussion strategy in a course of reading education news to extend teacher education students’ perspectives in educational contexts. A total of 22 teacher education students enrolled in the course. In the course, a particular type of peer-led discussion strategy was designed for reading 12 pieces of education news. The statistical and interview technique were used to analyze the data on the Reading Perspective Record Form. The study concludes that the majority of teacher education students extended their perspectives on reported educational events by evaluating multiple perspectives during peer-led discussion. Importantly, the peer-led discussion strategy facilitated the students to develop strategic knowledge in relation to educational problems.
Highlights
Educational news stories, reporting educational events that happened in schools, classrooms or education institutes, can provide teacher education students with the opportunities to understand educational contexts
The study concludes that the majority of teacher education students extended their perspectives on reported educational events by evaluating multiple perspectives during peer-led discussion
The study concludes that the majority of teacher education students, participating in 12 sessions for peer-led discussion, extended their perspectives on reported educational events in the ways of broadening, deepening and above both by evaluating multiple perspectives during peer-led discussion
Summary
Educational news stories, reporting educational events that happened in schools, classrooms or education institutes, can provide teacher education students with the opportunities to understand educational contexts. Teacher education students may be difficult to evaluate these reports in a realistic context due to a lack of sufficient teaching experiences. My previous study (Liu & Tsao, 2013) revealed negative effects of biased educational news stories on teacher education students’ beliefs about pedagogy. Another study (Liu, in press) further evaluated that a designed framework about dialogue and discussion benefits teacher education students to change their perspectives on educational news stories. The above studies did not determine the approaches to, and extent of, changes in perspectives on educational news stories. This study attempts to explore the degree of the changes in perspectives on reading education news
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