Engineering students' attitudes towards teaching in secondary schools as part of the Educational Clinic programme

As part of the effort to increase involvement in the community, the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology initiated a unique programme entitled the Educational Clinic, which trains students to be teaching assistants in secondary schools. After undergoing academic training, the students teach science and engineering to small groups of secondary school students for a period of ten weeks' duration. The study described in this article characterised, by means of qualitative tools, the attitudes of 46 engineering students towards teaching in secondary schools in the framework of the programme. It was found that the weight of the attitude component, which recognised the contribution of teaching in the programme was notably higher than the weight of the component indicating the difficulties that accompanied the teaching experience.