COOL Teachers Wanted! Barbara Sabitzer, Ernestine Bischof, Peter Antonitsch, Department of Informatics Systems, Klagenfurt University, Austria barbara@isys.uni-klu.ac.at, ernestine}@isys.uni-klu.ac.at, peter.antonisch@uni-klu.ac.at About 30 % of the differences in the performance and learning outcomes of pupils can be explained by features of the teacher and the instruction. Therefore it is obvious that cool teachers (in the sense of good and competent teachers) are needed. According to an Austrian project, COOL teachers are wanted, too. In this context COOL stands for COoperative Open Learning, a teaching model mainly based on Helen Parkhurst’s Dalton Plan. COOL may also be read as COmputer-based Open Learning that can support teachers and pupils in many ways and all subject matters. Both, Cooperative and Computer-based Learning can be very effective, which is supported by neurodidactical research as well. But unfortunately, they are still not applied by all teachers nor integrated in the curricula of teacher education. No matter which meaning of COOL prevails, cool teachers are needed in any case. This paper will try to develop a profile of COOL (in all three senses) teachers and show how we can help people to become cool respectively to apply COOL. Furthermore it presents some examples for COOL teaching and reports on experiences of COOL teachers. 1 Introduction The daily work in classroom with more and more "difficult" pupils as well as numerous scientific papers (Bernard et al., 2010) claim it: Teachers and teaching must change because also pupils and conditions change. COOL teachers are wanted! This means: Teachers have to - be cool in the sense of good and competent, not only in their subject matter(s) but also in his/her behavior in classroom; - foster COOL methods, which means COoperative Open Learning methods according to the Austrian teaching concept COOL, and - apply COOL - COmputer-supported Open Learning. The abbreviation COOL is taken from an Austrian teaching model of the same name - it will be described in 2.1, but in this paper the term COOL will imply all three definitions given above because they all allow brain-based or better brain-friendly and therefore effective learning. It may be effective but it requires another type of teacher than represented in traditional classroom settings. The characteristics and qualities of a COOL teacher are described in 3.1 and summarized in the COOL teacher profile. Based on these requirements the paper will propose some contents that, in our opinion and supported by neurodidactics, seem to be necessary in the teacher education and in-service training. Finally, we report on some COOL experiences in computer science education and two projects of the Austrian support program "Informatik kreativ unterrichten" (Teaching Informatics Creatively) that show how neurodidactical principles and brain-friendly learning can be put into practice. 2 What is COOL? COOL has, as already mentioned above, three meanings that all belong to a good respectively COOL teacher.