2007 Volume 16 Pages 142-152
This paper deals with the issues around how we trained pre-service teachers at a private university of arts between 2003 and 2006.
A curriculum based on the model of pedagogical reasoning and action proposed by L. S. Shulman was planned and delivered in the teacher education course. Our three purposes in using this model were to have the students:（1）experience "a cycle of pedagogical reasoning and action";（2）become more autonomous as student teachers;（3）develop practical professional skills. In the case method, student teachers were asked about their selection of the teaching materials, in order to test their pedagogical content knowledge, and they were asked to respond as if they were professionals. This aims at making the teaching practice provide an opportunity for students to think and act as professional teachers.
The present article deals with three detailed cases of students teaching art lessons in public junior high schools. These two students taught more actively, deciding the subject matter and objectives of learning, creating teaching materials and methods, evaluating and reflecting on their lessons. This evaluation and reflection led them to find out their own problems about subject matter, goals of learning, and their own teaching, which made them redesign their next lesson. What they did was to encourage the students to truly appreciate their art lessons. Two of the student teachers developed their pedagogical content knowledge in their teaching practice. The other one had to teach a particular lesson unit to junior high school students and did not decide the objectives of learning and teaching materials himself. Nevertheless, a meeting with a music teacher in the teaching practice became an opportunity for him to reflect on his own teaching and develop a new understanding of it.
All of them were able to adapt their teaching to the "assembly-line method" of normal lessons, but they were unable to fully utilize what they had learned from their teaching practice through reflection on their own teaching. From this study, it can be said that students need to reflect on their own teaching in order to develop understanding of pedagogical method and principle. As a conclusion, the paper points to the need for a reorganizing of curriculum based on "a cycle of pedagogical reasoning and action", as a suggestion for the improvement of teacher education.
