This article proposes a new research approach to teachers' lesson planning. While numerous guidelines have been dominating lesson planning as an object of teacher education, we utilize teacher cognition and expertise research to view lesson planning from a different perspective: We argue that lesson planning typically demands specific cognitive skills that teachers must master to create high quality instructional practice. The so-called CODE-PLAN model (cognitive demands of lesson planning) forms the general theoretical framework for our conceptualization of six demands (content transformation, task creation, adaptation to student learning dispositions, clarity of learning objectives, unit contextualization, and phasing) to empirically describe and analyze teachers' planning competence. We investigate how these demands are met through content analysis of 337 plans for demonstration lessons written by teacher candidates during induction in Germany. Statistical findings on the construct, curricular, and predictive validity of planning competence measures show that the CODE-PLAN model may open new empirical research perspectives on teacher planning competence and stimulate curriculum design in teacher education.

In the current debate on pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), the term is used to refer to the context-specific knowledge that teachers activate when reflecting on practice. Against the background of this debate, we conducted an empirical study and sought to answer the question of which knowledge experts and novices activated in assessing a videotaped lesson in relation to its effectiveness for learning. Our assumption was that the participants activate their PCK as a blending of content knowledge (CK) and pedagogical knowledge (PK) as suggested by Shulman's amalgam thesis. The participants (9 experts and 9 novices) were shown a lesson on optics, in which the law of refraction (Snell's law) was being studied. In a subsequent interview, the participants were asked to analyze the observed lesson. A qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the interviews showed that experts activated both CK and PK intensively and in this respect they differed significantly from novices. Further analysis of the expert statements also proved that they do not activate their CK and PK in isolation, but instead combine both kinds of knowledge together, in line with Shulman's amalgam thesis. # 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 55: 2018 Keywords: pedagogical content knowledge; science teacher education; professional development; teacher cognition Discussions on the nature of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) have been circulating for around three decades. The origin of these discussions can be traced back to the works of Shulman (1986Shulman ( , 1987 and his concern that the efforts being made at the time to prepare pre-service teachers were largely focused on imparting general pedagogical skills while at the same time questions regarding the content to be taught in lessons were being neglected. Therefore, he called for teacher education to be more strongly focused on content in the future and felt that content and pedagogy should be viewed as "part of one indistinguishable body" (1986, p. 6).This demand was linked to a classification of teacher knowledge, in which Shulman differentiated between seven components of knowledge: content knowledge, general pedagogical knowledge, curriculum knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, knowledge of learners and their characteristics, knowledge of educational contexts, and knowledge of educational ends, purposes, and values, and their philosophical and historical grounds (1987). Within this structure for classifying knowledge, however, Shulman placed particular emphasis on PCK. "Among those categories, pedagogical content knowledge is of special interest because it identifies the distinctive bodies of knowledge for teaching. It represents the blending of content and pedagogy into an understanding of how particular topics, problems, or issues are organized, represented and adapted to the diverse interests and abilities of learners, and presented for instruction." (1987, p. 8) This definition of PCK was linked to Shulman's "amalgam thesis": PCK is "that specific amalga...

This study aimed to examine whether principles of effective teaching constitute essential criteria for a systematic and successful analysis of lessons. After watching a video of a complete lesson, the participants (each of nine experienced and pre-service teachers) were asked to analyse this lesson in terms of effectiveness for pupils' learning in the form of an open dialogue. Their comments were analysed by means of a qualitative content analysis and revealed that the experienced teachers independently used the wide range of principles of effective teaching and differed significantly from the preservice teachers in this regard. Particularly striking were the large differences in the activation of knowledge about these five principles: goal orientation, relating cognitive activities to prior knowledge, classroom climate/learning atmosphere, clarity, and using appropriate examples. These differences point to specific development tasks, in order to improve the analytical skills of student teachers within teacher education.

No abstract

Lesson planning is an essential part of teachers’ daily work. In this study, we focus on structuring as an aspect of lesson planning, which generally can be defined as a clear, recognizable organization of instruction into individual phases and segments in which the teacher gradually builds up the complexity of the knowledge to be acquired and ensures a smooth flow of instruction through appropriate sequencing. In a previous study (Krepf and König in press), we conceived structuring as an aspect of lesson planning. To test the validity and reliability of this study’s findings, a scaling-up study was conducted to determine whether structuring as an aspect of planning could be modelled reliably using a different and larger sample. In this study, 310 written lesson plans created by pre-service teachers during induction (172 at T1 [first lesson plan]; 138 at T2 [last lesson plan/state examination]) from North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and Berlin derived from the PlanvoLL‑D project (König et al. 2020a, 2020b) comprised the study’s data. The lesson plans were evaluated through content analysis using deductively formed categories. Afterward, the coding was quantified and analyzed using item response theory (IRT) scaling. The results indicated that two subscales could be separated in terms of content: a “contextualization” scale and a “phasing” scale. Furthermore, three explication levels could be distinguished. Measures of lesson structure planning increased during induction significantly with practical relevance. This study contributes to the research on modelling and measuring pre-service teachers’ planning competence.