Using Peer-Led Discussion Strategy in a Course of Reading Education News to Extend Teacher Education Students’ Perspectives in Educational Contexts

Educational news stories can provide teacher education students with the opportunities to understand educational contexts. However, teacher education students may be difficult to evaluate these stories in a realistic context due to a lack of sufficient educational experiences. If teacher education students have the opportunity to discuss the reported events of education news and to reflect on critical educational issues, they may uncover new understandings of education news stories. This study attempts to employ peer-led discussion strategy in a course of reading education news to extend teacher education students’ perspectives in educational contexts. A total of 22 teacher education students enrolled in the course. In the course, a particular type of peer-led discussion strategy was designed for reading 12 pieces of education news. The statistical and interview technique were used to analyze the data on the Reading Perspective Record Form. The study concludes that the majority of teacher education students extended their perspectives on reported educational events by evaluating multiple perspectives during peer-led discussion. Importantly, the peer-led discussion strategy facilitated the students to develop strategic knowledge in relation to educational problems.


Introduction
Educational news stories, reporting educational events that happened in schools, classrooms or education institutes, can provide teacher education students with the opportunities to understand educational contexts. However, in the case of Taiwan, most of local newspapers primarily reported arson, criminal activities, disasters, and scandals (Lu, 2010). Ang Lee, a Taiwanese who is famous for international film, expressed that most of Taiwanese media news presented negative coverage. Generally, news media disseminate education news to the public and, consequently, may play a role in shaping public opinion regarding education policies (Picciano & Spring, 2013). Accordingly, teacher education students may be difficult to evaluate these reports in a realistic context due to a lack of sufficient teaching experiences. My previous study (Liu & Tsao, 2013) revealed negative effects of biased educational news stories on teacher education students' beliefs about pedagogy. Another study (Liu, in press) further evaluated that a designed framework about dialogue and discussion benefits teacher education students to change their perspectives on educational news stories. However, the above studies did not determine the approaches to, and extent of, changes in perspectives on educational news stories. Following my previous studies, this study attempts to explore the degree of the changes in perspectives on reading education news.
Peer learning gives an opportunity for students to bring their variety of pre-experiential knowledge to the discussion and promotes dialogue and learning (Hendriks & Maor, 2004). Studies (Rogers, 2003) suggested that students in learning communities tend to learn more from their peers than from their teacher. Ideally, if teacher education students have the opportunity to collectively discuss the reported educational events and to reflect on critical educational topics, they may uncover new understandings of educational news stories. together can result in cognitive change (Broughton & Sinatra, 2010). Piaget (1977) believed that peer interaction is an activator for change in perspectives because cognitive reorganization occurs when an individual faces with new perspective and feedback that contradict their understandings. Peer-led discussion differs from teacher-led discussion. In opposite to teacher-led discussion, peer-led discussions provide a free and relaxed atmosphere for discussion, which makes students feel uninhibited in asking questions and challenging the statements of others (Beach, 1974). Peer-led discussion has been an important instructional practice in education field (Berne & Clark, 2006;Evans, 2002;McMahon & Raphael, 1997;Paratore & McCormack, 1997). A large body of research has pointed out that peers' interaction has positive influence to learning performance (Clark, 2009;Henning, 2008;Kuter, Gazi, & Aksal, 2012;Postholm, 2008).
As mentioned, the perspectives of teacher education students on education context are likely to be influenced by negative coverage, but peer-led discussion would allow them to articulate their developing ideas, to receive feedback, to reread all records, and to then respond to their reflections over time (Gambrell, Malloy, & Mazzoni, 2007;McMahon, 1997), and so their perspectives towards the events change. Teacher educators could combine peer-discussion strategy with educational incidents during the preparation program for the purpose of helping teacher education students explore the boundaries of an image of education. Based on the above demonstrations as well as the specific finding from my previous studies, the purpose of the study is to examine the approaches to, and extent of, changes in perspectives on reported educational events for teacher education students via peer-led discussion strategy.

Theoretical Perspectives
Education news with negative ideology may induce reader to result in mistaken identification on reported educational events. Studies found that readers' background knowledge about the texts can influence text interpretation (Garner, Alexander, Gillingham, Kulikowich, & Brown, 1991). That is, when teacher education students with insufficient teaching experiences read ideological education news, they may perceive a gloomy picture for education and further decrease their enthusiasm for education jobs.
Improvably, students can help one another construct meaning and fill in missing background information by discussion (McMahon & Raphael, 1997). Discussion is an orderly process of face-to-face group interaction in which students mutually exchange ideas (Killen, 2000). Actually, discussion can be considered as the art of cooperative thinking aloud and exchanging ideas (Killen, 2000). Students are encouraged to make public their perspectives on issues arising from the text, to consider alternative perspectives proposed by peers, and attempt to reconcile conflicts among opposing points of view. Soter et al. (2008) identified 13 parameters of discussion that are proved for promoting high-level comprehension: pre-discussion activity to promote individual response; teacher choice of text; teacher control of topic; students have interpretive authority; students control turns; small group structure; either teacher-led or peer-led but begin with teacher-led; heterogeneous ability grouping; reading prior to rather than during discussion; genre (narrative fiction); medium to high expressive stance; medium to high efferent stance; high critical-analytic stance; content/and or process post-discussion activity. Briefly, these parameters constitute a set of conditions, such as teacher chooses text and arranges heterogeneous members into teams, students read text and narrate text, students with authority to dialogue and to response in turns, students actively comment others' perspectives, and students reflect and write after discussion. The above conditions facilitate peer-led discussion and allow students to engage in meaningful conversations which improve reading comprehension.
In terms of cognitive processes, group reading helps learners extend their thinking through dynamic interactions among readers and text (Daniels, 2002). The learners have opportunities to explore peers' thinking about the reading text by turns, to interpret and construct meaning (Ghaith & El-Malak, 2004), and to obtain different perspectives from what peers read (Almasi, O'Flahavan, & Arya, 2001;Jalilifar, 2010). In peer-led discussion contexts, students engaged in greater amounts of student-directed talk and questioning than in teacher-led contexts (Almasi, 1995). Such peer interactions facilitate students develop higher-level thinking abilities to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate various information (Goatley, Brock, & Raphael, 1995). Studies have evidenced that peer-led discussion enhanced deep comprehension and students' ability to mediate personal connections and multiple perspectives (Hill, 2012;Hill, 2013). Through the process of exchanging opinions, students also become more competent in response-related skills necessary for discussions such as elaborating ideas of others and requesting clarification. Students with different abilities can participate in a rich discussion in which they not only shared their ideas but also altered these ideas in response to those of others in the course of the discussion. Being engaged in multiple perspectives from talking, listening, asking and responding benefits students' critical thinking competence (Kong & Pearson, 2003). www.ccsenet.org/ass Asian Social Science Vol. 10, No. 18;2014 Grouping readers with different opinions to discuss a problem provides readers opportunities for applying the cognitive strategies that they begin engaging in their preparation before the discussion (Daniels, 2002;Morocco & Hindin, 2002), of which, changes in opinions are inevitable (Schwarz & Linchevski, 2007). As stated by Rogoff (1998, p. 717), ''it may not be the conflict but the processes of co-elaboration which support cognitive progress, as several points of view are examined and modified to produce a new idea that takes into account the different standpoints''. Students develop enthusiasm for sharing their thoughts and ideas with their peers (Long & Gove, 2003), and these discussions require students to support their ideas with evidence from the reading text (Morocco & Hindin, 2002).
During a discussion about educational events, teacher education students may disagree on the solution to the educational events. The students may accommodate their divergent views to elaborate new knowledge through dialogue and reflection. Nguyen (2009) examined an inquiry-based teaching/learning model involving diverse members of learning communities and suggested that participants broadened and deepened their perspectives when they interrogated their own and one another's perspectives. Studies have shown that dialogue facilitates evaluation and integration of knowledge (Hermann & Woyach, 1994), and self-reflection (Albrechtsen & Hovden, 2010;Crasborn, Hennissen, Brouwer, Korthagen, & Bergen, 2011). The peer collaborative reflection facilitates student teachers' perspectives to change (e.g. broadened and deepened) in common issues and assists them in developing their professional knowledge (Manouchehri, 2002). Bridges (1990) indicated that in order for an exchange of ideas to be an academic discussion, it should satisfy five logical conditions: 1). people must talk, 2). listen, 3). respond to one another; 4). they must be collectively putting forward more than one point of view, and 5). they must have the intention of developing their knowledge, understanding, or judgment of the issue under discussion. Compared to co-construction of knowledge, the above logical conditions involve information processing, comparisons between different perspectives, reflection on multiple perspectives, and potential changes to their initial perspectives. However, peer-led learning is not an easy option for inexperienced instructor and effectively structuring a clear sessions is necessary (Cheng & Walters, 2009;Hammond, Bithell, Iones, & Bidgood, 2010). Reasonably, using peer-led discussion strategy with clear framework in reading education news may extend teacher education students' perspectives in educational contexts.

Research Methodology
To examine the approaches to, and extent of, changes in perspectives on reported educational events for teacher education students, this study adopts similar news materials as well as record tables (i.e. Reading Perspective Record Forms) with my previous study (Liu, in press). However, subjects, time of data collection, and technique of peer discussion differ from ever. A teacher education course about news reading was taken during the autumn semester of 2013 in a Taiwanese university with teacher education institutes. Of 18 weeks in the course, the former six weeks were employed in the session of reading education news with peer-led discussion, as this study's focus. The remaining weeks were not involved in data collection of this study.

Participants
A total of 22 teacher education students voluntarily enrolled in the course after being fully informed about the research process, any potential harm the research might cause, and an important right that they can withdraw from the course at any time without suffering any potential discrimination or harm. The participants, consisting of nine males (41%) and 13 females (59%), majored in mathematics (1), literacy and language arts (7), science (2), special education (4), social studies (6), and arts and physical education (2). Which of them, 13 (59%) students have taken over than half teacher education credits (the total is 26 academic credits by national regulation), the remaining students (41%) have not. All participants in this study have no practical experience in actual classroom situations. These participants with different majors were randomly divided into six groups.

Educational News Coverage
To foster teacher education students' ability to evaluate educational news stories, educational news stories happened in two year in Taiwan were the main course material. Initially, 15 educational news stories were selected for peer-led discussions. These short stories are mainly about educational issues (e.g. teacher teaching methods, and relationships between teachers and students/parents). Similar to my previous study (Liu, in press), two criteria (strong perception and interesting for discussion) were used for evaluating the suitability to peer-discussion. Six professors reviewed the news coverage and chose twelve educational news stories for this study. All chose news stories were not re-edited.
Take a piece of the educational news stories as an example. 'A junior high school teacher, Teacher Chang, asks www.ccsenet.org/ass Asian Social Science Vol. 10, No. 18;2014 his students to achieve a writing task which title is "my teacher's shortcomings". Most students feel fun and are interested in recalling their teachers' daily behavior. After all, this is the first time for those students to write the composition related to the issue about their teachers. When the students finish the compositions, Teacher Chang invites several students to present the composition in front of the classroom. Teacher Chang said in the later interview that "in the beginning, I felt embarrassed and somewhat angry when my students unkindly described my shortcomings and accused me of unfairly treating them". Students' compositions certainly make Teacher Chang deeply self-reflect on daily practice in the school'. The above news story possibly involves an ideology, implying that being a good teacher is not easy.

Peer-led Discussion Strategy
According Hammond, et al. (2010), effectively structuring a clear sessions for peer-led learning is necessary. The discussion framework refers to a discussion condition provided by Bridges (1990), 1). People must talk, 2). Listen and 3). Respond to one another; 4). collectively put forward more than one point of view, and 5). They must develop their knowledge, understanding, or judgment of the issue under discussion. Additionally, according to Soter, et al. (2008) and above mentioned, a set of conditions, such as teacher chooses reading text and arranges heterogeneous members into teams, students read text and narrate text, students with authority to dialogue and to response in turns, students actively comment others' perspectives, and students reflect and write after discussion, can be employed to build a peer-led discussion strategy.
In this study, after choosing educational news stories and grouping students, each member of the group was given a copy of news coverage and was asked to read and wrote down their initial perspectives firstly. Secondly, discussion begins. Participants in groups took turns to talk about what they wrote individually, and then participants had to comment at least one's perspectives and responded the peer's comments. Afterward, all participants were encouraged to free raise any question to peers and to response any question from peers during the discussions. After peer-led discussion, everyone was required to write down some statements about the issues as their reflection. In each group, a student leader was appointed by the instructor. When the participants in a group stopped their discussion, the group leader needed to ask effective questions to a peer's comments and facilitated group discussion till time out.
The above discussion processes are similar to my previous study (Liu, in press). However, this study, differing from ever, did not limit time for each stage of peer-led discussion. The time limits resulted in insufficient discussion in my previous study.
A total of twelve discussion sessions were implemented in the study. Additionally, to reach the purpose of the study, all participants were instructed on how to implement and complete the work for each phase of the proposed framework.

Data Collection
Teacher education students participated in a one-hour workshop for 12 sessions, twice a week for six weeks. To achieve dependability, demonstrated by the use of overlapping methods, and validate the analytical results, we obtained primary research data by using a designed record form and interviews.

Reading Perspective Record Form
A record form was utilized to compare the differences between teacher education students' initial perspectives and their final perspectives on educational news stories for evaluating the effects of peer-led discussion. There were three columns in the record form, key concept, original perspective and final perspective. The content in key concept column aimed to confirm effective reading on education news. When a participant's initial perspectives were not related to the educational news stories, the record form would be considered as an invalid data. The participant expressed original comment on the reported event in the second column of the record form. After peer-led discussion, all participants were asked to reflect on their own comments and those from the other participants, and afterward, wrote down their own final perspectives about the event in the third column of the record form.

Interview
In order to explore the teacher education students' thought as well as triangulate the quantitative data, the interview technique was utilized. Semi-structured interviews were administered to provide evidence of changes in perspectives. After each discussion session, all record forms were instantly analyzed. The participants who deepened, broadened and unchanged in perspectives, respectively, on educational news event were invited to interview on the next day of discussion session. The interview questions focus on the changes in perspectives and how to be impacted by peers. The questions are: 1. Why did (not) you change your perspectives on www.ccsenet.org/ass Vol. 10, No. 18;2014 educational news event? 2. How did (not) the peer-led discussion facilitate your changes? During interview, the interviewee's Reading Perspective Record Form was provided to assist them to recall. All participants had been interviewed at least two times from the beginning to the end of the study.

Data Analysis
After each session, the collected data were analyzed. The descriptions in the second (initial perspectives) and in the third column (final perspectives) of each record form were compared to indicate the potential changes in perspectives on educational news event. In addition to relative literature (Rogoff, 1998;Schwarz & Linchevski, 2007), this study refers to a discrimination provided by Nguyen (2009), who indicated that participants broadened and deepened their perspectives when they interrogated their own and one another's perspectives. All compared results were categorized as 1).unchanged, and 2).changed (broadened, deepened, opposite perspective, and combinations of any two changed types). "Broadened" is to make something include more things or people. "Deepened" is to make someone's perspectives more strategic. "Opposite perspective" is that the final perspective is opposite position from original perspective.
Analysis of the interviews involved transcript reviews to determine what factors impacted participants' changes in perspectives on educational events and to draw conclusions. After transcribing the interviews, the researcher organized the interviewee's comments into categories. Usually the interview questions and the goals of the interview provided the framework for doing this. When a pattern emerged, the researcher reviewed it again to identify the relationships and trends among various comments and discussion data.

Results
A total of 264 copies of record forms from 22 teacher education students in 12 sessions were analyzed. The quantitative analytical result ( Moreover, Table 1 also shows that 50 frequencies of teacher education students' perspectives (roughly 19%) changed in the way of both broadened and deepened. Additionally, roughly 5% perspectives deepened. That is, peer-led discussion makes 24% of response perspectives on educational news events deepen. "Deepened" means more detailed understanding, maybe involving practical and strategic knowledge in relation to resolution of the reported educational problem. During peer-discussion, in addition to exchange of their thoughts, teacher education students were asked to comment peers' perspectives. Moreover, most education news involved www.ccsenet.org/ass Asian Social Science Vol. 10, No. 18; 2014 6 educational problem in educational situation. Some teacher education students could further mention potential strategies about resolution of the educational problem by responding peers' comments. When peers mentioned specific strategies that facilitated listener's previous experiences as well as alternative perspectives and were further evaluated as a feasible resolution, the listeners may change their original perspectives, as a deepened approach to change. Take an example as follows.
Actually, I fought with my previous classmate according to my childhood memory. I remembered my teacher interviewed my parents many times. When I read the educational problem related to bully event, and listened a perspective from my teammate who mentioned "home visit", I considered the method about teacher-parents meeting for resolving the child's problem in the educational event as a good strategy. (D-2, 6 th session) Additionally, most interviewees in the category of "deepened perspectives" expressed that evaluating peers' perspectives was a necessary process before accepting peers' perspectives.
If I considered a perspective mentioned by my teammate as a reasonable method through reflection in the base of my previous school experiences, I would accept the perspective. However, sometimes I might adjust the details of the perspective through evaluating its merit and shortcoming on resolving the educational problem (C-4, 7 th session).
Notably, the analytic result of all record forms reveals that the portion of unchanged perspectives is about 6.5% only. According to analytical result of interviews, participants with strong experiences fixed their own initial perspectives on educational events even though peers mentioned many facets of perspectives. An interviewee expressed.

In terms of the education news in this session, my teammate mentioned a couple of facets about how to resolve the conflict between teacher and students, such as school regulation, classroom management strategy. In my initial perspective, family education is still a vital factor impacting a child's behavior. My parents often told me, when one express specific arguments along with angry emotion, others only remember his/her emotion instead of his/her arguments. Thus, I did not agree with my teammate and did not change in my initial perspectives. (D-2, 5 th session)
The course of reading education news via peer-led discussion strategy provides teacher education students with the opportunities to create socially-mediated meaning. Based on the analytical results, peer-led discussion strategy facilitated teacher education students to create multiple perspectives on the reported educational events. Importantly, about 24% of response perspectives from participants developed potential strategies about resolution of the educational problem during peer-led discussion, especially discussing with those who mentioned specific experiences. The participants with specific experiences insisted on their initial perspectives and played a leader role in formation of final perspectives.

Conclusions and Discussion
This study attempts to employ peer-led discussion strategy in a teacher education course related to reading education news to extend teacher education students' perspectives in educational contexts. The study concludes that the majority of teacher education students, participating in 12 sessions for peer-led discussion, extended their perspectives on reported educational events in the ways of broadening, deepening and above both by evaluating multiple perspectives during peer-led discussion. Importantly, about 24% of response frequencies involve resolution strategy of the reported educational problem during peer-led discussion.
As mentioned, teacher education students lack of formal teaching experiences. Peer-led discussion can assist them fill in the gap between educational problem and background knowledge in relation to educational contexts (McMahon & Raphael, 1997) and extend their thinking through dynamic interactions among readers and reading text (Daniels, 2002). The study results, revealing various changes (e.g. broadened, deepened, above both) in perspectives on educational news stories, identify that peer-led discussion facilitates knowledge development and changes in opinions, as the base of literature review (Kuter, Gazi, & Aksal, 2012;Postholm, 2008;Schwarz & Linchevski, 2007). Peer-led discussion involves an exchange of ideas (Bridges, 1990;Killen, 2000;Sandidge, 2007) and is a process of evaluating information when people are asked to generate the perspectives on discussed events. During peer-led discussion, teacher education students read education news, understood the educational events, produced initial perspectives on educational problems of news, and listened and commented peers' perspectives. However, due to various opinions, teacher education students needed to compare multiple perspectives. At that time, the previous experiences of each participant became an important factor impacting individual's change or unchanged in perspectives, as indicated by literature: prior knowledge play the crucial www.ccsenet.org/ass Asian Social Science Vol. 10, No. 18;2014 role in construction of knowledge (Ertl & Mandl, 2006;Schwarz & Linchevski, 2007). Specifically, when teacher education students considered their specific experiences as a reasonable way to resolve the educational problem in the reported events after evaluating peers' perspectives, they still insisted on their initial perspectives. On the contrary, if teacher education students have never experienced the event similar to education news, they would assess others' perspectives, and even, may adjust initial perspectives, and changed their own perspectives on the educational problems. The above descriptions can explain why teacher education students' previous experiences play a key role during peer-led discussion.
Moreover, all participants were asked to provide their perspectives on the reported educational events so that multiple facets of perspectives were produced in a group discussion. When the teacher education students assessed those multiple perspectives and considered some perspectives as an additional facet, they broadened their perspectives on the educational events.
Notably, most education news with negative ideology that described an educational event or problem (e.g. conflict between teachers, students and parents) may facilitate teacher education students to think the resolution of the educational problem. Particularly, peer-led discussions with a free and relaxed atmosphere makes students feel uninhibited in asking questions and challenging the statements of others (Beach, 1974). A part of teacher education students performed self-projection to educational problem when reading education news. The students could free raise their perspectives during peer-led discussion. All participants were facilitated to comment peer's perspectives and to respond peer's comments, cognitive reorganization occurred. Moreover, if the participants' perspectives coming from their previous experiences demonstrated the reasonability for resolving educational problems, they would fix their own initial perspectives and persuaded peers to follow their perspectives. Specific strategic knowledge in relation to deep perspectives emerged. The participants with sufficient experiences played a leader role in formation of final perspectives in the free and relaxed atmosphere during discussion.
In term of extent of changes in perspectives, the frequencies of deepening happened less than broadening. After all, most of teacher education students have insufficient teaching experiences to think about practical details, neither enough educational knowledge to promote strategic resolution to the educational problems.
Education news with negative ideology, differing from general reading text, provides teacher education students with chances of thinking the resolution of educational problems. Additionally, peer-led discussion provides them with dialogue, thinking, evaluation and reflection to extend their perspectives, and even produces strategic perspectives on educational events. Although small-group peer-led discussion frameworks are not new in classrooms, this study contributes to the literature by identifying that using the peer-led discussion strategy into reading education news can facilitate teacher education students to develop strategic knowledge in relation to educational problems.
There is a limitation given that the educational news stories of the study tend to be negative ideology. The educational news stories usually report an educational problem in education situation and easily facilitate teacher education students' discussion. However, the ideology may vary depending on individual perceptions. It is unclear whether the influences of ideology of education news on teacher education student can go beyond the study conclusion.