A Study on Effectiveness of a Group Dialogue Approach for Nursery Student Teacher Education

抄録

This study focuses on the effectiveness of using the group dialog technique World Cafe in Post-Guidance for the nursery training segment of teacher education. There ware 106 participants, all of them Japanese junior collegestudents.Our World Cafe consisted of three sessions of progressive conversation lasting approximately thirty minuteseach, followed by a reflection among the whole group. When all participants were seated, they explained thepurpose and the logistics of the Cafe. They were told that the would be moving from table to table and that the endof a session may come when they were in the middle of an intense conversation. They explained that when asession ended, one person would remain behind as the host of that table, and the other people will move to newtables to sit with a different mix of people. Participants wrote or drew ideas on paper table cloths, enabling other Cafeparticipants literally to "see" what they mean.Before and after World Cafe, we conducted participant questionnaires about the scale of their reflection ofteaching practice in nursery, pre-school teacher efficacy, positive and negative feelings. Answers concerning preschoolteacher efficacy, positive feelings, negative feelings were analyzed by Paired t-test. Analysis showed thatparticipants became more consciously reflective of their nursery training and they had a positive impression ofWorld Cafe. The implication of this study was that students understand and assimilate more extensively aboutnursery care and education through effective dialogue, which gives full play to their reflections.