Let’s Team Up! Measuring Student Teachers’ Perceptions of Team Teaching Experiences

Loan De Backer,Wouter Schelfhout,Mathea Simons,Ellen Vandervieren

doi:10.5772/intechopen.96069

Abstract

Since collaboration within schools gains importance and is considered significant for teachers’ professional development in order to meet the new 21st-century educational demands, teacher education institutes show a growing interest in field experiences inspired by collaborative learning, such as team teaching. Team teaching is a teaching model in which (student) teachers work collaboratively in the preparation, teaching and evaluation of a course. In order to assess team teaching practices in teacher education by monitoring perceptions of collaborative team teaching experiences, an instrument is needed that offers insights to guide the learning process and support well-founded decision making. Therefore, an easy-to-use quantitative questionnaire to explore student teachers’ team teaching perceptions was developed and validated in four stages: an extensive literature review (1) resulting in a preliminary questionnaire containing advantages and disadvantages of team teaching (2). Next, a pilot study was conducted with 14 student teachers (3), followed by a further validation and reliability study based on exploratory factor analysis, peer debriefing, confirmatory factor analysis and internal consistency analysis with 181 participating student teachers (4). The final questionnaire comprises 29 Likert-items in four scales – collaboration, co-creation, coaching and complexity – and appears to be both valid and reliable.

Highlights

1.1 Collaborative teaching in teacher educationWithin teacher education, field experiences are crucial in the training of future teachers [1] as they trigger learning [2]
Since collaboration within schools gains importance and is considered significant for teachers’ professional development, teacher education institutes show a growing interest in field experiences inspired by collaborative learning [17]
We focus on team teaching as a field experience model applied by student teachers during teacher education in which the student teachers have the opportunity to team teach during practical lessons on campus or during internship lessons in schools

Summary

Introduction

1.1 Collaborative teaching in teacher educationWithin teacher education, field experiences are crucial in the training of future teachers [1] as they trigger learning [2]. Student teachers are traditionally placed individually with a mentor [3], i.e., the teacher in whose classroom the internship is conducted. They start by observing their mentor and, afterwards, get the responsibility to take over the class individually during a number of hours [4, 5]. Collaboration between teachers is significant for their professional development [8] in order to meet the new educational demands of the 21st century [9, 10].

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