Developing paired teaching placements

Abstract

This article reports upon a 3-year action research programme intended to provide trainee teachers with peer support in planning and carrying out class teaching. It was hoped that this would provide an additional encouragement for trainee-teachers to broaden their teaching repertoire, together with better opportunities to reflect on and evaluate the successes and failures of their teaching ventures. Subsequent monitoring identified the need to develop better pairing strategies and stronger guidance for trainee-teachers and class-teachers in the form of role-descriptors. Trainee-teachers reported favourably on the extra support that the paired placement provided. An unexpected benefit was that the trainee-teachers valued the opportunities to learn from watching their partner teach. This learning was reported as being easier than learning from the observation of more highly-skilled practice. Action research allowed continual refining of the original idea and the incorporation of further developments that arose as a result of the study.