The triads work together during the 16-week student teaching placement to introduce upper elementary students to engineering concepts by integrating engineering activities in the cooperating teacher's classroom.
The student builds his/her knowledge interacting and cooperating with peers both in the classroom and in the online space (Shea & Bidjerano, 2010; Shea et al., 2012).
We recruited 30 kindergartners for participation from one of our cooperating schools (approximately 22% of the school's kindergarten population), with 16 in one classroom and 14 in a second classroom.
In even the best instances of PTs and cooperating teacher relationships, the PT is still a visitor in a classroom and not the overall coordinator of what is taught within its walls [5].
Preservice teachers initially accepted the guidance provided by teaching analysis tools, but abandoned the tools in favour of informal self-assessments and feedback from cooperating teachers when they assumed teaching responsibilities in their own classrooms.
Access to nature was supposed to develop self-confidence, responsibilities, sense of pride, cooperate, solving problems in classroom, and relationships between students and teachers.
In other words, the prospective teacher adheres to the pre-established classroom rules, procedures, and curriculum, and follows the lead of the cooperating teacher.
The online J-Classroom platform has three major functions including resources co-building and sharing, data recording and analyzing, cooperating and innovating between teachers and students.
An essential feature of the program was a triad partnership between preservice teachers, cooperating teachers, and engineering graduate students that was designed to have each member bring a different set of expertise to the classroom.
