This work shows the result of a research-action process carried out during the academic year 2007/08 in the frame of the subject ‘General Didactics’, belonging to the 2nd year of the Studies for the Degree of Teachers. The main goal of this research is to analyze the benefit of three elements of teaching innovation for the acquisition of professional competences by University students: (1) Work Project (WP ahead); (2) joint planning and the intervention of qualified professionals in the subject, who are referent teachers for our University students; and (3) the organization and development of workshops for Early Years pupils.
Firstly, we will describe the teaching innovation experience and then we will introduce the research process carried out.
We, as teachers, subscribe to the Socio-Constructivist Theory (Ortega, 2005; Kutnick, Blatchford & Baines, 2005; Kutnick & Kington, 2005; and Pozo, 2008), which states that efficient learning is achieved when the students themselves take the responsibility on the organization and development of their own academic work. In the same way, we base on the works of Pérez Gómez (2008) to back formation centred in competences, which allow students to learn doing, to solve practical problems and meet real professional requirements (similar to those they will face in their future working scenarios).
As a consequence of this theoretical background, he have taken practical decisions that affect the design and development of our subject, whose key elements are: (1) Joint planning of the work between the Early Years teacher and the University student; (2) Seminar on ‘Work Projects: to live and learn in the Early Years School’ taught by the teacher herself, who is an experienced professional in the implementation of WP; (3) Organization of the University class as a frame for co-operative learning, whose groups search, select and analyse the information they need to elaborate their own WP; (4) Preparation, organization and decoration of spaces to do the workshops in which pupils will participate; (5) Visit of 100 children (aged 3, 4 and 5) to the Faculty of Education to participate in the workshops; (6) Shared assessment of the experience among the teachers who monitor the visit, and the University teachers and students who participate in it.
Along this innovation experience we have set a research-action process, whose most relevant dimensions are as follows: (1) Elaboration and filling in of a Likert Scale (designed on an ad hoc basis) at the start and the end of the subject, to assess if our students think they have increased their command of professional competences after having done this subject; (2) Semi-structured group interviews to deepen in the knowledge of their arguments regarding the benefits and/or limitations of this subject for the command of their competences; and (3) Analysis of their reflections, gathered in a personal diary, and centred in the usefulness and motivation degree that comes up from this innovation experience for their professional and academic qualification. The analysis and crossing of data has allowed us to make a methodological triangulation to give our conclusions the highest consistency and credibility.