Larike H. Bronkhorst

Deliberate practice in teacher education

Deliberate practice is increasingly recognised as necessary for professional development. This paper sets out to explore in what ways student teachers’ learning activities in a teacher education programme can be characterised as deliberate practice. Based on an in-depth exploration of 574 learning activities, our results highlight the different ways in which activities in teacher education programmes can be designed, the different motivations students have to engage in them repetitively, and different ways in which feedback can be organised, within contextual constraints posed by all professional environments. Results also indicate that self-improvement is not the only motivation for engaging in deliberate practice for student teachers, as pupil improvement is also considered important. These results support a context-specific operationalisation of deliberate practice and provide starting points for teacher education programmes to promote deliberate practice in their curriculum.

University teachers' collateral transitions: Continuity and discontinuity between research and teaching

Abstract University teachers in teacher education programmes are increasingly expected to combine teaching and research, in spite of widespread recognition of the differences between these epistemic practices. This study questions how the (dis)continuities university teachers encounter, when engaging in a collateral transition between research and teaching, are experienced. To answer that question, this study engages in an in-depth longitudinal analysis of 84 weekly journals reported during such a transition. In contrast to widely held assumptions, we find that continuity can also be experienced negatively, whereas discontinuity is sometimes experienced quite positively. Based on our results, we offer suggestions for how transition processes can be supported.

The explication of quality standards in self-evaluation

Education aiming at students’ competence development asks for new assessment methods. The quality of these methods needs to be assured using adapted quality criteria and accompanying standards. As such standards are not widely available, this study sets out to examine what level of compliance with quality criteria stakeholders consider satisfactory. Two professional education programmes specified the implicit standards they applied in a self-evaluation procedure designed to evaluate the quality of their Competence Assessment Programs (CAPs). They specified similar cut-off scores, but different descriptive standards. Analysis revealed that this was due to theIR experience with competence-based education and the quality of their own CAP, but influences of the selected method and the understanding of the quality criteria were also found. As such, the specified standards are local, but meaningful for the programmes’ quality assurance. Implications for self-evaluation and standard-setting procedures are discussed.

Supervision Dialogues in Teacher Education: Balancing Dis/continuities of the Vocational Self-Concept

Teacher educators and student teachers are increasingly expected to reflect together on the student teachers’ image of self as a teacher. To better understand how to deal with occurring tensions, we studied 42 supervision dialogues, audiotaped in a 1-year, post-master, teacher education program. We analyzed in what way student teachers and teacher educators explored both sensed continuity and sensed discontinuity when they discussed development as a teacher. We identified three types of processes in which student teachers and teacher educators outweighed issues of discontinuity: (a) balancing with time, or accentuating specific perceptions of the past in relation to expectations of the future, or vice versa; (b) balancing with content, or elaborating on other self-attributes; and (c) balancing with salience, exploring the relative worth of self-attributes and/or intentions. The results support student teachers and teacher educators in explicitly discussing sense making patterns in the context of teacher education.