In the ProKom-LAB project, we are investigating the effectiveness of a seminar concept for promoting the professional competence of prospective teachers of industrial-technical subjects at vocational schools. This study is being funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of the "U.EDU: Unified Education - Media Education along the Teacher Training Chain" funding line under the joint "Teacher Training Quality Initiative" of the federal and state governments. The project is being carried out by the TU Kaiserslautern in cooperation with the working group for "Vocational Education, in particular technical subjects" at the University of Hamburg.

The study is embedded in a free training course and extends over three online appointments. These can take place by arrangement in the period from December 2022 to June 2023. The training is aimed at students in the Master's program for teaching at vocational schools and is implemented in a digital learning environment ("smallPART"). Students of technical subjects (metal technology, automotive engineering, automation technology, electrical engineering) can take part.

To assess the quality of teaching, we show students video scenes from real lessons before and after a seminar unit. In a short seminar between the tests, the participants receive training in observing lessons. We would like to investigate the extent to which this training influences their ability to classify teaching scenes with regard to certain quality criteria. The focus is therefore on promoting professional competence with regard to the perception of teaching quality.

You can download

• a flyer for lecturers who may be interested in integrating the seminar concept into their courses.
• A short version of the flyer is also available for advertising via your Instagram channel or other media for distribution to students.

The training is based on video vignettes of technical lessons at vocational schools, which were created as part of the predecessor project "ViKobeL" (video-based skills assessment in vocational teacher training in metal technology). These video vignettes can be used to record the competencies required by the KMK. As a theoretical basis for this, an action-oriented model was developed that relates facets of teachers' professional competence to characteristics of teaching quality (Walker & Faath-Becker, 2019).

However, it is not enough to simply provide an instrument to record competencies. At the same time, competence must be built up on the part of BBS students. This is precisely where the ProKom-LAB BBS project comes in, by setting up/implementing/realizing a teaching-learning laboratory that enables students to plan, implement and reflect on competence-promoting lessons. The success of learning with video vignettes depends very much on a person's experience with video-based lesson analysis and their own teaching experience. Furthermore, there are currently no video vignettes in Germany for recording the professional competence of student teachers at vocational schools (apart from the video vignettes created in the ViKobeL project).