Eline Vanassche

Teaching as a General Educationist in Physical Education

“If you’re good at something, if you really master the content, teaching seems to work much better. Students give you the feeling that you have something valuable to offer because you exude expertise. They show interest. It seems like you can only really be a teacher if you’re holding expertise in a particular area.” These words are taken from the opening paragraph of Koen’s self-study research report. Koen is an experienced teacher educator with a background in general education. His students in the teacher education program of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at the University of Leuven generally gave him the feeling of “being a teacher” described above, as he used to readily illustrate his courses with “real-life” examples from his own career as a teacher or his experiences as a father. With his students in the bachelor program of physical education at Odisee University College, however, Koen had to come a long way in developing content knowledge. For a few years, he helped his colleagues with the basic motoric skills test during the introductory days for first-year students of the physical education program. The first glimpse students get from him is that of a teacher in sportswear holding a stopwatch. Koen enjoys the anticipation with which students look at him, wondering about the quality of their physical performance. When students later ask him curiously about his sports discipline, he notices a sense of disenchantment. “No, I don’t have a sports background, I’m an educationist.” That very moment, it feels like a myth is being dispelled. It makes Koen wonder about the extent to which he can still be of interest to his students. Does he display enough expertise or mastery to be able to teach them?

Retelling and Reliving the Story: Teacher Educators Researching Their Own Practice in Flanders

In this section, we will present the experiences and findings from the first systematic project of self-study of teacher education practices in Flanders (Belgium), entitled “Learning and facilitating learning in the workplace: A project of self-study in teacher education.” This chapter sets the scene and orients the reader to the rest of the section. In the following paragraphs, we first describe the context of this collaborative project (section “Situating the project”) and present the protagonists and the script underlying the different acts (section “Participants and process”). In the section “Lessons on self-study facilitation,” we present a number of lessons learned from our attempts to support and facilitate a self-study research group. As such, this section aims at contributing to a pedagogy for the facilitation of self-study in teacher education practices. The fifth and final section of the chapter looks ahead and introduces the rationale behind the three following chapters. Each of the chapters reports on the content and outcome of one particular self-study of practice included in the project in the form of a retrospective “tetralogue.”

Internship Assignments as a Bridge Between Theory and Practice

Elien’s self-study project is rooted in some frustrating experiences in her role as the internship coordinator at the bachelor program of early childhood education at Thomas More University College. Year after year, she noticed that student teachers did not make use of the conceptual frameworks and tools from the theoretical courses in the program during their internship practice. “You go to great lengths to tell student teachers how to teach and yet they are not able or willing to translate those insights into their practice.” One measure to “bridge” the theory-practice gap adopted in many teacher education programs, including the program Elien teaches on, is creating structured assignments that student teachers are expected to implement and analyze during internships. Assignments are designed to encourage students to study their teaching practice and reflectively connect the frameworks from theoretical courses with what happens in schools (Kelchtermans G: De kloof voorbij. Naar een betere integratie van theorie en praktijk in de lerarenopleiding. Rapport opgesteld in opdracht van de Vlaamse Onderwijsraad [Getting beyond the theory-practice gap. A report for the Flemish Educational Council]. VLOR, Brussels, 2003). However, more often than not, student teachers execute these assignments as routinized tasks, reducing the value of reflection on practice to the need to complete the assignment and “move on” with “what really matters,” that is, doing the practice of the internship. They do not seem to get the purpose of the assignments to actually contribute to the improvement of their own practice or situation. These observations formed the starting point for Elien’s self-study project.

The Role of the Teacher Educator During Supervisory Conferences

Before his retirement, Ludo worked as a teacher educator in the teacher education program of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at the University of Leuven for over 10 years. A central component of the program is the student teaching internship. Roughly halfway into the internship, Ludo visits his student teachers in schools and observes a lesson. After this lesson, his observations are debriefed in the supervisory conference with the student teacher. He has a very clear understanding of what his role should be during post-observation supervisory conferences: facilitating student teachers’ self-reflective analysis of their teaching experiences. Yet, in his actual practice, Ludo felt he did not always live up to that ideal and his unease with his enactment of supervisory conferences grew over the years. He noticed how he often switched from his deeply valued reflective approach to a more directive approach or a problem-solving, result-driven, technical debriefing of the lesson. He was taken aback by the “master” in him, who very skillfully and diligently tells the student teacher how to (better) deal with a particular situation. This unease and his self-critical reflections formed the starting points for Ludo’s self-study project.