ONLINE PEER COACHING FOR OPTIMIZING THE MANAGEMENT OF TEACHING PRACTICE ACTIVITIES

Abstract

The article presents the construction and functionality of a virtual peer coaching system, made on a moodle platform (www.moodle.ro), which system is focused on the management of teaching practice activities, experimented for 16 weeks by 6 teaching practice tutors (coordinators from important Romanian university centers) for the purpose of creating an online professional community of experiential learning based on the professional expertise and current practices. The tutors participating in the online peer coaching system are university teaching staff with an experience of over 5 years in the coordination of teaching practice and have the status of experts in education sciences. At the level of the experiential learning community among peers, the tutors offer support to one another as to optimizing students’ teaching practice activities. The finalities targeted through the online peer coaching system regard the dissemination, from the same to the same, within the online discussions and personal reflection themes, of concrete practices and situations in the students’ teaching practice probationary stages amplifying and refining the tutors’ competences related to the management of teaching practice. In an online peer coaching system, each tutor has the possibility of setting its personal agenda of collaborative learning depending on its immediate interests and the curricular projection specific to teaching practice probationary stages. Also, the tutors present online their common experiences with teaching practice students and turn to good account the video registrations from pedagogical practice, as a support of the analyses initiated at the level of the online experiential learning community. The dynamics of tutors’ interventions within the experiential learning community in an online peer coaching system is visible on the Moodle Romania platform. The tutors share resources and useful psycho-pedagogical instruments for analyzing students’ teaching exercises, for monitoring the practical activities, for evaluating the performances of students in the teaching practice probationary stage while disseminating, in the discussion forum, good practices, opinions, suggestions, recommendations for ensuring a quality management of teaching practice activities. The participants in the online peer coaching activities critically and self-critically analyze their own experiences related to the coordination of teaching practice and bring to the forefront relevant case studies from students’ practice for the didactical career. Tutors exchange among them psycho-pedagogical instruments which proved to be efficient in teaching practice and receive observations from their colleagues for the review of certain instruments, techniques and procedures applied in the management and monitoring of teaching practice activities. This study engages a qualitative methodology. The article presents the preliminary results of experimenting the online peer coaching model: the architecture of a virtual environment of experiential learning among peers (teaching practice tutors) focused on the improvement of the teaching practice management, the construction, in the form of group cognition, of common approaches, of managerial strategies to make teaching practice more efficient, the creating of an electronic database for teaching practice, the drafting and application of a grid for self-evaluating the professional conduct in an online peer coaching system, the premises of a future research project regarding the optimization of teaching practice supported by the computer. Such results constitute important anchors for continuing and extending the research through the opening and flexibilization of the virtual environment of experiential learning in peer coaching system also to other tutors (in the country and abroad), interested in transferring from the professional competences to their colleagues wishing to perform in the management of teaching practice activities.