Teach as you Preach: Teacher Training for STEM Educators at DTU

At technical universities today, we are training students for jobs that do not yet exist, to use technologies that have not been invented, to solve problems, we do not even know are problems yet. To succeed, we must create sustainable learning processes allowing our students to construct proper conceptual understanding and be able to retrieve, transfer, and apply knowledge, skills, and competences in new complex settings.

To facilitate such learning processes, higher education institutions must train excellent teachers. This paper presents the framework for STEM teacher training at DTU – Technical University of Denmark. A framework that claims exactly to train excellent teachers by practicing what we preach: Employing a student-centred approach focusing on student motivation with active learning and constructive alignment to ensure conceptual understanding.

Rather than presenting long theoretical lectures to the participants of our teacher training programme, we – from day one – ask them to engage in a range of carefully planned activities designed to scaffold the construction of sustainable knowledge, skills, and competences that can be activated in unknown future contexts. Exactly as we wish for them to do with their own students.