Student teaching from the perspectives of cooperating teachers and pupils

Abstract

To facilitate student-teachers’ transition from internship to permanent positions, they are advised to meticulously learn from real experiences of practicum process as it might form their future teaching practices. To help promote the effectiveness of this process, investigating student-teaching from stakeholder perspectives could be enriching. Research on the cooperating teacher has mainly dealt with the perspective of student-teachers; however, this study focuses on student teaching process from the perspective of both cooperating teachers and the pupils in student-teacher’s classes of EFL in a Turkish teaching context. We administered open-ended questionnaires to 21 teachers and 114 pupils and carried out inductive qualitative content analysis to analyze the data. The study elaborates on the cooperating teachers’ and pupils’ perceptions of the student-teachers as well as the impact of their teaching. Results reveal that the arrival of student-teachers was highly welcomed by most of the students and some of the cooperating teachers even though some expectations from student-teachers were not met.

Keywords

• teacher education
• student teaching
• perceptions of pupils
• perceptions of cooperating teachers
• student-teachers