Section archive - Instruction in Teacher Training

The purpose of this study is to better understand teacher professional development in a paired-placement context. It focuses specifically on how two teacher students (STs) in Vietnam, Hien and Chinh, develop their professional identities in the collaborative setting, and how factors specific to pair-work mediate this process. Findings from this study suggest that an individual teacher’s identity influences her/his cognitive and affective perception of an event. Paired-placement created an environment whereby the student teachers’ conflicting identities, associated with different cognitive and affective perceptions of the experience, were challenged, leading to contradictions. However, within the framework of planned and supervised collaboration, the STs resolved most of their conflicts constructively and experienced qualitative development in their teaching identities.

Building on research on teacher noticing, this study focused on examining how mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) can support the development of prospective teachers (PSTs’) noticing key aspects of mathematics teaching and learning through a carefully constructed video analysis activity. The authors found that the views expressed in group discussions at the beginning of the semester were not static; PSTs engaged with each other and their instructor to consider the interaction among teaching, students’ perspectives, and students’ MMKB. This finding suggests that PSTs need multiple opportunities to expose and identify their fragmented awareness and to develop more informed and considered perspectives. Discussion with peers as well as input from instructors can help PSTs move toward a greater understanding of the resources available to and used by students. This study provides some understandings of PSTs’ learning through a particular form of approximation and decomposition of practice.

This paper reports findings from a discourse analysis, informed by a discursive psychology (DP) perspective, of pre-service teachers’ beliefs about teacher effectiveness as constructed in reflective papers. DP treats beliefs as discursive productions that are occasioned by an interactional task and are made visible through discursive features. The analysis highlights the discursive features employed by pre-service teachers as they wrote about teacher effectiveness in relation to their field observations.

In an attempt to provide alternative models of field experience in teacher education, this review study elaborates team teaching.First, the literature will be explored in order to search for team teaching models that can be used during field experiences in teacher education. The study categorises the wide variety of team teaching models into five models, which differ in the degree of collaboration, i.e. the observation, coaching, assistant teaching, equal status, and teaming model. These models can act as a guide when implementing student teachers’ team teaching during field experiences. Empirical research on student teachers’ team teaching shows its advantages and disadvantages for the student teachers, their mentors and the learners in their classroom.