The shutdown of universities and schools in England, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, came just as many pre-service students began their final practicum. This research focuses on the challenges this p...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02619768.2020.1820480

The Covid-19 pandemic and its effects on teacher education in England: how teacher educators moved practicum learning online

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Best Practice Teacher Education Programs and Australia’s Own Programs

In this study, we examined changes in levels of pre service teachers' reflective writing and tried to identify links between these changes and pre service teachers' success in teaching. Participants were two groups of pre-service special education teachers that taught in two different special education settings: learning difficulties classes and multiple and profound intellectual disabilities classes. Data collection was performed during two consecutive academic semesters, including a monthly structured journal about teaching events during field experience and summative grades, assessing pre service teachers' teaching activities for each semester. Journal analysis referred to three reflective levels of explanations, descriptive, comparative and critical. Results indicated that both groups improved in descriptive levels of explanations, but only one group improved in higher levels of reflective (comparative and critical) explanations. Differences between the two groups were explained in context of different settings in field experience, lack of former knowledge and experience in one group, participants' characteristics and different supervisor's responses to the journals. These differences explain the higher levels of reflective thinking in one group. A positive correlation was found between grades in field experience and descriptive and comparative explanations in the first semester for both groups. In the second semester, field experience grades correlated only with critical explanations, meaning that only those who reached critical level of explanations also improved their teaching acts correspondently. These results point towards a professional developmental relation between reflective writing and teaching during teacher education process.

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Reflective Writing in Pre-Service Teachers' Teaching: What Does It Promote?.

Across the international teacher education literature, the practicum appears time and again as a key component of initial teacher education programmes. Whatever terminology is used to describe it, the practicum continues to be viewed by the majority of pre-service teachers across a range of international contexts as the most important factor in preparing for the teaching profession. While the practicum remains highly valued, it is also highly scrutinised and contested, with different stakeholders weighing in to debates about the place of practice in philosophical, pedagogical, procedural, and policy terms. This chapter considers these international debates and explores the various implications for practice from different perspectives and approaches.

The Practicum: The Place of Experience?

The title of the 2014 Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA) conference was Teacher Education, An Audit: Building a platform for future engagement. One of the conference themes was Professional Experience: What works? Why? I seized upon this theme and the title of the conference as it afforded me an opportunity to do an audit of my research in professional experience over the last 25 years. This article presents this evidence base and the messages I have taken from this evidence. I have done this in the hope that, by collating some of the insights gained from the past and the present, it will help to “build a platform for future engagement” in professional experience. In preparing this article I was asked by the Editors to reflect also on how I developed my distinctive line of inquiry and expertise in relation to the practicum across an extended period. These reflections are included. I hope they will support university-based teacher educators in enhancing their satisfaction and achievements from...

Professional Experience: Learning from the Past to Build the Future.

This literature review presents a systematic analysis of 113 empirical studies conducted between 1996 and 2009, portraying a picture of the rationales, goals, activities, roles, and outcomes in the different practicum settings in teacher education programs. The review shows that the rationale, goals, and activities in the different practicum settings are focused on teaching competencies and acquaintance with the pupils’ diversity. The supervisors’ role is focused mainly on the preservice teachers’ inner world, and only few studies examined school students’ achievements as a result of preservice teachers’ instruction. The individual relationships between mentors, supervisors, and preservice teachers were attended by tension and conflicts ensuing from different interests, educational philosophies, and status differences that were not bridged. Preservice teachers’ acquaintance with staff and principals at the host school were a negligible part of the practicum descriptions. The discussion will portray two ki...

Esther Cohen

Papers

The practicum in preservice teacher education: a review of empirical studies