Abstract
Teachers are essential for the integration of digital technologies into schools and lessons. Their qualification for this task is therefore of central importance in all phases of teacher training, especially since only about one third of teachers currently in active teaching service had learning opportunities for digitization-related competence building during their studies. Despite the desire for a digitization-related qualification, however, German teachers attend continuing education courses comparatively rarely. In addition to a lack of fit in the training offered, an insufficient offer could be responsible for this discrepancy. In this study, we investigate which in-service training courses were explicitly offered to science teachers via state in-service training catalogues in 12 of 16 German states, which competence areas of the orientation framework “Digitale Kompetenzen für das Lehramt in den Naturwissenschaften (DiKoLAN)” the in-service trainings address, and to what extent the didactic functions addressed in the in-service trainings could have supported teachers in providing distance learning during the 2020 school closures. A total of 90 in-service trainings are identified, too few to adequately address the objectives of the KMK strategy “Bildung in der digitalen Welt/Education in the Digital World”. The offers show little evidence of factors that enable individual teachers to build cumulative competence. Almost all of the in-service training offers address competence areas of the DiKoLAN orientation framework that are relevant for science teachers, and some of them are suitable for teaching teachers the didactic functions that can also be used in distance learning.