The purpose of this paper is to highlight undergraduate students’ preparation as future teachers of secondary education through self-reflection and collaborative discourse in an educational psychology course. The participatory learning processes of undergraduate students from various education programs (art, English, math, music, physical education, science, and social studies) will be illustrated. During each weekly class, students provide written reflection about their assigned reading based on “Do Now” prompts. This offers an opportunity for showing comprehension of psychological information. Next, students engage in “Collaborative Problem-Solving” as heterogenous groups (different programs) or homogenous groups (same programs) and apply psychological knowledge for addressing authentic secondary school situations. Following collaborative discourse, groups verbally present their written analysis of classroom situations for whole-class discussion. Such collaborative discourse aims at fostering reflectiveness, responsiveness, and resourcefulness through interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary integration of psychological knowledge as related to secondary education. Finally, students provide written reflection for “Exit Ticket” prompts. This culminating task encourages students to reflect on their own learning and to articulate the significance of what they learned about their role as future teachers. This paper will exemplify how undergraduate students’ learning of educational psychology, in alignment with their teacher certification subject-area, is promoted through participatory learning processes geared towards advancing their knowledge, skills, and dispositions as future teachers. Statistical analysis of students’ written responses, before, during, and after collaborative problem-solving, will also be presented to substantiate illustrations of participatory learning processes related to students’ understanding of educational psychology for secondary education.

Authors:
Alpana Bhattacharya, Queens College & Graduate Center, The City University of New York, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Alpana Bhattacharya is an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at CUNY Queens College and Graduate Center. Her research interests and current projects include virtual cross-cultural education; human vs AI grading; video vs live fieldwork.

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