DEPTH – Developing Professional Thinking for Technology Teachers: An International Study

The tools to help teachers reflect on their professional knowledge are few in number, and often difficult to utilise. This paper reports on a study conducted with both primary and secondary technology initial teacher education students in a number of different countries who were given the same teacher-knowledge graphical framework as a tool to support reflection on their own professional knowledge. We wanted to investigate if, despite the different country contexts, student teachers of technology could take advantage of their experience with graphic visualisation to help them articulate abstract notions such as aspects of their developing teacher knowledge. We discovered that the graphical tool acted as a framework that enabled them to set out their subject knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and `school' knowledge and was useful in helping them become more self-aware. In this paper, the framework itself is introduced, the way it was presented to the novice teachers is outlined and the relative impact of such `self awareness' on their understandings, enabled by the framework, is then discussed. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.