The impact of Situated Learning for prospective primary teacher education and for the school

The apprenticeship and the in-context experience of the pre-service teacher play an essential role in the construction of a professional attitude. The model developed with over 20 years of research during the Physics Education Course (PEC) in the 5 years long Master degree for Prospective Primary Teachers (PPT) at the University of Udine includes situated learning. By means of a process of reflective design and planning of educational paths, the prospective primary teachers implement Teaching Intervention Modules (TIMs) in the classroom and monitor the learning process of children. The preparation, implementation and evaluation of the TIM in real classrooms is carried out within the PEC itself and has produced an institutional interaction between the PEC coordinators and the schools. The perception of 360 in-service teachers on the quality of the implementation of the TIM was collected over three years using a questionnaire probing different perspectives. The opinions collected included those about the role and way of working of the prospective primary teacher, those about the research-based innovation of the path proposals, those about the impact in the specific classroom, those about the teaching style of the host teachers and finally those about the cooperation between schools and university.