Using LEGO® Six Bricks® as an educational resource to address challenges pre-service teachers face during school-based teaching practice

This chapter continues the argument for a dialectical integration of practice improvement and theory/knowledge advancement through participatory action learning and action research (PALAR) methodology. I explain an alternative to the traditional, positivist paradigm of learning and knowledge creation developed in terms of ontology (our assumptions about the nature of being/reality), epistemology (our assumptions about the nature of knowledge and knowing) and methodology (our consequent approach to problem solving and inquiry strategy). The chapter is based on (1) my perspective, drawing on more than 30 years of professional experience using action learning and action research and (2) my theoretical framework that includes selected aspects and principles taken from several existing theories, including grounded theory, action theory, critical educational theory, systems theory, personal construct theory and experiential learning theory. This framework explains why PALAR can be so powerful and successful in organizational change programmes. It therefore underscores the utility of PALAR for professional and action leadership development in the present time of rapid change and unpredictability. The chapter also synthesizes a thesis and an antithesis to produce a dialectic methodology.

Decolonisation of higher-education curricula has been a topic of interest, globally. Much dialogue on the decolonisation of curriculum in South Africa arose as far back as 1994. This was the year in which the democratic government came into being from that of the Apartheid regime, which started in 1948. Decolonisation of higher education in this country recommenced following the 2015–2016 student uprisings under the movements #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall, respectively. The colonised university education in South Africa was established by the British colony and was maintained by the Apartheid regime from 1948 until two-and-a-half decades ago. All South African universities had been dancing to the oppressive Eurocentric curricula since the higher-education system was first shaped and defined by racial domination. The colonised education robbed indigenous people of their histories, culture, and liberation. Education is humanistic, multicultural, and transethnic, and serves to promote and empower peoples’ social dynamics in terms of knowledge creation and production. This chapter reports on how leadership capacity of school-management teams was enhanced through systemic praxis, in professional curriculum practice in the small rural community of Hobhouse in the Free State province, South Africa. The chapter reports on the school community consciously intervening in the learning processes of 68 matric learners. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate how an indigenous African practice of involvement and engagement in community matters, called letsema, was used to turn the situation around in order to improve the low matric pass rate. Critical leadership theory, anchored in the Africana critical theory (ACT), was applied in motivating this study. A participatory action-learning and action-research (PALAR) approach was used as methodology. Through PALAR, the school community contributed positively to professional curriculum practices, and to leadership capacity building. The free attitude interview technique was applied to gather data in focus groups involving members of school-management teams, the school governing body, and the representative council of learners, teachers, parents, and the community in general. Critical discourse analysis, as advocated by Teun van Dijk, was used to arrive at the following findings: (1) Leadership resides in the collective; and (2) A shared vision and mission is a fundamental requirement for success, and can be facilitated by conscious leadership. The chapter concludes with recommendations that are based on the idea that reimaging school management and reshaping leadership have the potential to uncover novel opportunities for professional curriculum practices.

The successful training of preservice teachers in South African universities will be incomplete without the intervention of high school teachers, principals, and other stakeholders in education. It has been discovered that preservice teachers who teach Business Studies (BS) as one of the Economic and Management Sciences (EMS) subjects during teaching practice (TP) do not get enough assistance from their mentor teachers as they ought to because they are overloaded with much teaching work at this time. Therefore, the study aims to explore the different trajectories that preservice teachers take in their preparation for teaching Business Studies, the challenges 4th-year preservice teachers who specialise in EMS subjects encounter, how they overcome them, and how these trajectories impact their teaching practice experience. Overall, the study seeks to improve the quality of Business Studies education in South Africa by providing insights into the preparation and experiences of preservice teachers. Six fourth-year preservice teachers who taught Business Studies in Grades 10 and 12 were selected for the study to reflect on their experiences during teaching practice; hence, reflection was used as the data source for the study. Experiential learning theory was used as the lens of the study. At the same time, the interpretivism paradigm was adopted to understand individual preservice experiences. A case study was used as the design, and thematic analysis was adopted to analyse the data generated. The study found that preservice teachers who teach BS during TP face challenges such as a lack of Learning and Teaching Support Materials (LTSM), being assigned too much work to do, and the fact that BS has too much content to teach. Despite the challenges, these preservice teachers were creative enough to develop solutions, like designing posters without teaching resources and using practical examples to explain content for better understanding and parental involvement in class decisions such as discipline.

In recent years, South African universities have been called upon to address socio-economic challenges through forms of engaged scholarship that integrate teaching, research, and community partnership. Using a case study approach, this paper explores how a community-oriented student organisation at the University of the Free State (UFS) in Bloemfontein approached the academic facilitator and students of an entrepreneurship module with a request to help them become a viable and sustainable social enterprise as a means to combat unemployment and improve the graduate employability of its members. This request necessitated the formation of a community-university partnership (CUP) that employed community-based participatory research (CBPR) and participatory action learning and action research (PALAR) to support the development of a social enterprise. The partnership formed part of an experiential learning initiative embedded within entrepreneurship education at UFS. Through the use of CBPR and PALAR, the student organisation was assisted in identifying its strengths and weaknesses, and an action plan, based on a social enterprise business model canvas (SEMC), was designed to help the organisation achieve its goals. Findings reveal that engaging students in CBPR and PALAR through their partnership with the student organisation facilitated deep, experiential learning. The paper also reveals how collaborative knowledge production can generate mutual benefits for students, communities, and the institution.

More Practice for Pre-Service Teachers and More Theory for In-service Teachers of English Language

Simulation-based learning environments such as virtual reality (VR) can be promising to help pre-service teachers develop kindergarten-specific classroom management strategies. However, the successful integration of VR in higher education is impeded by limitations regarding the assessment of multifaceted skills such as classroom management strategies. In this paper, we aimed to understand how different assessment instruments lead to aligning or diverging conclusions regarding pre-service teachers’ VR-supported over-time development of classroom management strategies in terms of behaviors and beliefs. With a variety of self-reported and observational measures, we gauged distinct aspects of pre-service teachers’ classroom management strategies conceptualized as behaviors and beliefs at two time points: before and after practicing in a VR kindergarten classroom. Most measures captured an over-time development of behaviors and beliefs—except for pre-service teachers’ self-reported usage of classroom management strategies. Alignment was observed between measures gauging pre-service teachers’ classroom management strategies beliefs and between most, but not all, measures of classroom management strategies behaviors: Pre-service teachers’ self-reported usage of classroom management strategies do not align with the observations of strategy usage. Our findings emphasize the importance of using multiple instruments to capture, assess, and appraise VR-supported development of distinct aspects of pre-service teachers’ kindergarten-specific classroom management strategies.

Shyness appears as an important factor affecting teachers’, pre-service teachers’ and students’ performance and how teachers handle classroom management situations in the classroom environment. Thus, this study aims to bridge the gap in the research concerning teacher and student shyness and teachers’ classroom management strategies in the field of foreign language teaching and suggest new avenues for the investigation of the differences among teachers’ classroom management strategies in terms of teacher and student shyness. To achieve this goal, a sample consisting of 99 pre-service English teachers was requested to complete a survey measuring their shyness levels and their responses to hypothetical learners with different genders and shyness levels. The results suggested that pre-service English teachers’ high-powered strategy usage displayed a difference depending on student shyness, student gender, teacher gender, the interaction of student shyness and student gender and the interaction of student shyness and teacher shyness while social learning strategies indicated a significant difference depending on student shyness and the interaction of student shyness and student gender. A more detailed discussion of the findings and implications for teacher training and foreign language education were addressed in the article.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the perceptions of pre-service teachers regarding classroom management strategies employed by practicum instructors in school experience courses. This cross-sectional investigation was conducted with 245 pre-service teachers from various university departments. The study's data was collected via "Classroom Management Strategies Evaluation Scale". The scale had a Cronbach Alpha reliability coefficient of 0.94. For data analysis, descriptive statistics, the t-test, and one-way ANOVA were used. According to research findings, the gender of pre-service teachers, the gender of practice teachers, and the seniority of practice teachers had no significant impact on their opinions regarding the classroom management strategies used by practice teachers. However, the degree program that pre-service teachers attended and their grade point average had a significant impact on their opinions.

The mentor–preservice teacher hierarchy, that privileges mentor teacher talk and experience, often dominates mentor–preservice conversations. To realize the full potential of teacher education approaches designed to engage preservice and mentor teachers together in shared learning and teaching tasks, attention is needed to better understand the dynamics and implications of mentor–preservice teacher interactions. We analyzed how and when preservice and mentor teachers introduced ideas to group conversations and whose ideas were taken up by the group during a co-learning task. We found that mentor teachers tended to dominate group sense-making. However, preservice teacher use of imagination, the actions of teacher educators as brokers, and the use of boundary objects temporarily interrupted the dominant hierarchy. We conjecture that these moments raised preservice teacher status within the group so that mentor teachers took up preservice teachers’ ideas. Implications for promoting more equitable preservice teacher participation in sense-making with mentor teachers are discussed.

Practical experiences in teaching settings are an important component of pre-service teacher education programs. Pre-service teachers advance what they learn and improve their science teaching (ST) skills as well as other subjects in early childhood education for the period of teaching practices. In addition, teaching science in early childhood education requires more practices for improving teaching skills. Mentor teacher (classroom teacher) is valuable as well as professors in teacher education programs to pre-service teachers while teaching science. The purpose of this study is to reveal mentor teachers’ mentoring practices in ST according to pre-service early childhood teachers’ views. The method employed method was descriptive study. The sample is composed of 96 pre-service early childhood teachers and their mentors (N=41). Data were collecting within MEST survey. The results showed that most of the pre-service teachers reported their mentor teachers demonstrated less mentoring practices on the system requirement about ST. The pre-service teachers also pointed out that their mentor teachers mostly showed mentoring practices on personal attributes, pedagogical knowledge, modeling, and feedback factors. Knowing and 7understanding the mentoring skills of early childhood teachers in system requirement, pedagogical knowledge, modeling, giving feedback, and personal attributes would have an important growing on preservice early childhood teachers science teaching skills. That will be helpful for shaping new teaching practices and field experiences in different majors for improving teachers teaching skills.

This study aims to better understand the role of mentor teacher–mediated experiences in preservice teachers (PTs)’ progress toward the vision of teaching advocated by their programs. Data were collected from multiple cohorts of preservice science teachers at two university-based teacher preparation programs. Employing a qualitative, multiple case study approach, a total of 35 cases were analyzed focusing on the quality of mentor teacher–mediated experiences (i.e., modeling program-advocated vision of teaching, supporting PTs’ experimentation, and providing feedback), and its relationship to PTs’ progress over time. The analyses show that mentor teachers’ supportiveness for PTs’ experimentation played a critical role in facilitating PTs’ desirable changes. Well-structured experimentation created conditions for PTs to notice, leverage, and expand students’ sense-making repertoires in classrooms. Mentors’ modeling of program-recommended practices was not necessarily related to PTs’ progress. This study raises questions about prevalent perceptions of a good mentor teacher as someone who models program-recommended practices.

Influences on pre-service teachers’ intention to use classroom management strategies for students with ADHD: A model analysis

Developing science identity in pre-service science teachers is important as it influences their perceptions about science teaching and learning. Pre-service teachers’ science identity can be developed in their specific modules where they obtain content knowledge. Grounded in the notion of pre-service teachers’ learning agendas, and identity development, this paper presents an argument pertaining to how science content modules at one South African university contribute to pre-service teachers’ development of their identities as science teachers. Data were collected through individual interviews with 13 pre-service science teachers and analyzed using an inductive thematic analysis. The findings revealed four categories of aspects that influenced the pre-service science teachers’ identity construction and development. The first is about the nature of the subject matter knowledge taught in the modules. The second is about the context in which this subject matter knowledge is taught. The third concerns how teaching is conducted, and the last comprises the nature of practical work. These findings are discussed, and the implications related to the structure of science content modules in initial science teacher education programs are discussed.

With the study reported on here we aimed to explore and compare the experiences of pre-service teachers with their mentor teachers and of mentor teachers with their own mentor teachers when they were pre-service teachers. The design of this qualitative research was narrative inquiry. The study group consisted of senior pre-service pre-school teachers taking the Teaching Practice I course (n = 8) in the Faculty of Education at a state university and their mentor teachers (n = 4) teaching in public kindergartens. Qualitative data was collected through individual narrative interviews with pre-service teachers and their mentor teachers. The data was subjected to content analysis using inductive coding. Three themes emerged from the content analysis: (1) mentoring experiences of pre-service teachers and their mentor teachers, (2) mentoring memories of pre-service teachers and their mentor teachers, and (3) wishes of pre-service teachers and of their mentor teachers about mentoring. The most striking finding of this research was that the memories and wishes of pre-service teachers and their mentor teachers about mentoring were similar. The findings of this research are anticipated to bring about different perspectives and contribute to the content and effectiveness of teaching practice courses.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to examine changes in eight preservice teachers’ professional identity and the factors contributing to such changes during a four-week block practicum.Design/methodology/approach– A qualitative case study design was used and the data were gathered through semi-structured interviews with preservice teachers and their mentors, reflective journals and observation checklists. Thematic analysis was used to interpret the data.Findings– The findings showed high levels of confidence and development of teacher voice by the end of their four-week block practicum. The findings also suggested that positive mentoring relationships contributed to changes in the preservice teachers’ teacher identity.Research limitations/implications– Despite focussing on a relatively small number of preservice secondary teachers during the first four-week practicum of a single teacher education program at a Western Australian University, this research highlights the need to maintain constructive mentoring relationships with preservice teachers to provide positive influences on their professional identity. In order to facilitate this, preservice teacher education programs should provide thorough training for mentor teachers.Originality/value– This work highlighted the crucial role of mentor teachers in creating positive impacts on preservice teachers’ professional identity, such as development of their confidence and teacher voice. This paper provides useful insights for researchers, mentor teachers, and preservice teacher education policy developers.