An Alternative Approach to 21st Century Teacher Education: The Educational Potential of Mind Games

People in the 21st century are expected to possess skills that are in line with the zeitgeist. In this sense, teachers have important roles to play in educating people equipped with new skills. Based on this, the present study aimed to improve pre-service teachers' knowledge of mind games that can be used to enhance 21st-century skills in students and to integrate them into their teaching fields. In this study, carried out as a teaching experiment, pre- and post-interviews were conducted before and after integration studies and micro-teaching sessions in order to determine changes in pre-service teachers' knowledge and perspectives on integration. As a result of a 14-week study conducted with 67 pre-service teachers from eight different teaching fields at a state university, it was determined that, in addition to increasing the pre-service teachers' knowledge of mind games, a positive perspective developed toward the use of skill-content-game integration to facilitate the development of 21st-century skills. In the study, while pre-service teachers indicated the contributions that integration would make in terms of students and teachers, it was determined that they had a high level of intention to use mind games in their future professional lives.