Getting Experience in Computer Science Education - Guide to Teaching Computer Science: An Activity-Based Approach - page 250

in overcoming their difficulties, adopting a teacher-researcher perspective, and
developing a relationship between tutors through a process of creating copartner-
ship in a learning community.
2. Promoting the pedagogical professional skills by encouraging the students to
reflect on their teaching, fostering a teaching approach that develops the learners'
thinking and developing guidance tools that include the formation of interper-
sonal relationships with learners combined with the implementation of teaching
methods that suit the learners.
3. Promoting the disciplinary knowledge as a by-product of the guidance process.
Coping with others' difficulties enhances nuances in the understanding of dis-
ciplinary concepts perhaps not encountered by the prospective CS teachers as
learners, in the spirit of the well-known slogan “Teaching is the best way to
learn.”

A research conducted on one specific application of the mentoring model (Ragonis
and Hazzan 2009a ) found that during the mentoring process the prospective CS
teachers:

• Became aware of the importance of identifying learners' difficulties
• Emphasized problem-solving processes
• Became aware of the need to adapt their teaching process to different learners
• Adopted reflective thinking processes and encouraged these processes among
their tutees as well (see also Ragonis and Hazzan 2010 )
• Reinforced their own self-confidence regarding their ability and place in the dis-
ciplinary teaching process
• Realized the contribution of the tutoring model to their training as future CS
teachers

13.5 Practicum Versus Tutoring

Though the purposes of the practicum in schools and the mentoring experience are
similar, that is, to provide the students with an opportunity to gain some teaching
experience before becoming high school CS teachers, these two teaching experi-
ences are different. We mention three differences between the two teaching experi-
ences.
First, the responsibility of the teaching process is different in the two cases. While
in the mentoring process, the prospective CS teachers are the responsible figures on
the entire teaching process, the practicum in the school is limited to a small number
of lessons taught by the students, and in most cases they are treated as guests, even
in cases in which more profound models of co-teaching (Eick et al. 2004 ) or of PDS
take place (see Sect. 13.3 and Darling-Hammond 2001 ; Furlong 2000 ; Teitel 2003 ).
In these frameworks, the main responsibility of teaching the discipline does not lie
with the prospective teacher, but with the regular class teacher.