Abstract
The aim of the paper is to present the reflections of pre-service teachers of English of their general pedagogy practice. Their views on different aspects of the practicum are content-analysed as well as the feasibility of the tasks assigned to them during the field experience is verified. The first part contains an overview of selected issues related to teaching practice, among others the theory-practice gap, competences of a modern foreign language teacher, with special focus on his or her role of an educator, emotions accompanying the trainees’ field experience as well as relations between the university practicum coordinator, a school mentor and a trainee. There are also some considerations devoted to reflectivity, critical incidents and instruments supporting and monitoring effectiveness of the internship. The second part of the paper focuses on the small-scale qualitative study based on the reflections of first-year English philology students performing their general pedagogy practicum as part of their teaching specialisation. The article closes with some remarks related to the research findings.
Highlights
Teaching practice is an indispensable component of teacher education and requires constant attention and monitoring in Aleksandrowska, Gilis-Siek: Pre-service teachers’ views...order to ensure its best quality
With reference to the study’s major goal of exploring the student teachers’ views of their general pedagogy practice, owing to the document analysis it was possible to identify their attitudes to different aspects of this part of the practicum
The researchers were able to establish the scope of knowledge and skills that the trainees acquired during the internship as well as to explore their way of thinking about schooling and their own field experience
Summary
Teaching practice is an indispensable component of teacher education and requires constant attention and monitoring in Aleksandrowska, Gilis-Siek: Pre-service teachers’ views. Derenowski (2015: 37) reports that “testing and school documentation were not the topics requiring reflection” and that “the students did their reflection on the specificity of the teaching profession as well as, and importantly, on their personality features and the course of school lessons” (translation mine, OA) He concludes that undoubtedly, the practicum increases student teachers’ ability to make conscious decisions related to the choice of their future profession and their ability to engage in self-reflection. Richards and Farrell (2010) enumerate a noticeable number of benefits of using critical incidents in developing teachers’ professionalism, among others their positive effect on increased self-awareness, improved critical approach to pedagogical situations, enhanced evaluations skills, favourable conditions for action research They claim that recorded and shared critical incidents can help to build more permanent output such as a network of critical practitioners and a useful learning resource for other teachers. The second part of the paper deals with the study based on pre-service teachers’ reflections of their practicum and will show the connection between some of the topics reviewed above and the field experience of our trainees
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