Despite a growing awareness of the importance of future-oriented reflective practices among teacher-education researchers, there is a gap in the literature regarding the question of whether and in what way these kinds of written reflections promote the development of student teachers' professional identity. To fill this gap, the current study aims…

This study critically addresses mentor and mentee understandings of mentoring primary education student teachers within existing operations of power in the context of Scottish Initial Teacher Education. Semi-structured interviews of mentors and student teachers were used to elicit relational understandings of the mentoring process within an…

This qualitative study espouses an interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework to explore how mainstream experienced teachers (METs) and student teachers (STs) position themselves vis-à-vis inclusive education (IE). The theoretical framework emphasises that global changes in education require the placement of IE in the forefront of…

Teachers are expected to meet professional requirements concerning: (1) their role as a teacher, (2) capacity to teach and meet students' specific learning needs, (3) managing the classroom effectively, and (4) cooperating with other professionals within the school. Teachers build up competencies and experience challenges associated with these…

Learning to teach is an emotional endeavour and student teachers challenging emotions are recurrently created in teacher education. The aim of this study was to investigate student teachers' coping with emotionally challenging situations in teacher education. In the study, 22 student teachers studying their last year of teacher education…

Strategies student-teachers employ in classroom interaction with pupils during teaching practice periods are surprisingly understudied, considering that the teaching practicum provides a central arena for student-teachers learning to become teachers. This study investigates the primary strategies student-teachers utilised in classroom interaction…

Cooperating teachers' beliefs of effective supervision of student teachers may play an important role in mentoring practices. By systematically analysing metaphors unconsciously expressed in the discourse of cooperating teachers concerning supervision of student teachers, these beliefs could be made explicit. This study explored: (1) what…

Student teachers' research is usually valued more for its contribution to their professional learning than for its contribution to the research topic itself. This paper reports on a research collaboration with eight student primary teachers in England, intended to build on a previously established project investigating young children's…

Student teachers studying to become primary school teachers in New Zealand can spend up to 24 weeks on professional teaching practice in schools. This paper describes a model (based on the Conversational Framework by Laurillard), developed after conducting an action research study requiring critical reflection on the practice of giving feedback to…

Giving effective instructional explanations requires a special type of pedagogical content knowledge, that is, foreseeing where students could employ different assumptions in building their understanding of a specific content. This paper proposes the importance of rehearsing instructional explanations and fine-tuning the coherence and…