Getting Experience in Computer Science Education - Guide to Teaching Computer Science: An Activity-Based Approach - page 247

essence and complexity of teacher's work; (d) to enable a meaningful dialogue with
mentor-teachers, school staff, other students, and the pedagogical supervisor in or-
der to fully understand the underlying aspects of various educational processes; and
(e) to enhance informal relationships among students, mentor-teachers, and high
school pupils, and to practice how to develop relationship with their future teaching
partners.
During the 2 weeks of practicum, the prospective teachers also join their ped-
agogical supervisors to visits in various high-tech companies and in other high
schools that implement other CS curricula (if exist) or have a special, state-of-the-
arts computer lab or other unique features and equipment. In general, the objective
of all these activities is to expand, as much as possible, the student-teachers' school
experience, as well as their CS knowledge and pedagogical perspective.

13.4 A Tutoring Model for Guiding Problems-Solving Processes 5

In this section we present a tutoring model whose objective is to develop and es-
tablish the pedagogical-disciplinary knowledge of prospective CS teachers with re-
spect to guiding learners in problem-solving processes.
The tutoring model focuses on the tutor, who is a prospective CS teacher (i.e.,
a student) enrolled in the MTCS course, and is based on hands-on teaching expe-
rience. It comprises individual tutoring whereby the students, whose CS knowl-
edge is more established, tutor novice CS students enrolled in an introductory CS
course. In other words, during the tutoring process, tutor-students, the prospective
CS teachers learning the MTCS course, who have already acquired CS knowledge,
support the learning processes of novice CS learners. Since the mentoring model
is integrated in the MTCS course, it is actually based on an active application of
pedagogical-disciplinary knowledge acquired in the MTCS course in actual teach-
ing situations.
In what follows we focus on the actual implementation of the tutoring model.
Additional details can be found in Ragonis and Hazzan ( 2008 , 2009a , 2009b ).

13.4.1 The Implementation of the Tutoring Model

Tutoring takes place in one or two series, each of which includes five sessions with
a single tutee—a student (or high school pupil) who is taking an introductory CS
course. Focus is placed on problem-solving processes and the activity is accom-
panied by guided reflective processes. These teaching situations enable the tutors
to cope with learners' difficulties in understanding different CS concepts and in
problem-solving processes. The model, thus, implements principles of constructiv-

5 Based on Ragonis and Hazzan ( 2009a ). Copyright 2009 by the Association for the Advancement
of Computing in Education (AACE). [http://www.aace.org] Included here by permission.