Reflection in teacher development is important as it can help both experiencedand novice teachers to better understand the processes theyare involved in. It can also be used to aid evaluation processes. This paperpresents a small scale study that involved undergraduate Englishphilology students from Gdańsk University who were studying for theteacher specialisation. One of its purposes was to trial a strategy forfeedback that could be used to mediate an already existing model ofassessment for students’ taught lessons, which previous to the studyused only a prescribed set of assessment criteria. Another purpose wasto promote a reflective turn in both the student-teacher and academicmentor (myself), which would then inform the discussions that tookplace after each observed lesson. In addition to this, I was interested tofind out if this strategy would generate a suitable quality and quantityof information, so that it might be used for further research. Overall,the strategy proved a useful aid to reflection in relation to the students’teaching practices. As a research tool, it also generated usable data.
In pre-service training for teachers of English opportunities for dialogic interaction (Skidmore and Murakami, 2017) with a mentor are seen to play an important role in professional awareness and development (Wallace, 1993; Gabryś-Barker, 2012; Howard and Donaghue, 2015). To fulfil the demands of their practices student-teachers work with a number of different people: a school teacher (mentor), aca-demic supervisor and the academic staff who lead the English teach-ing methodology course (Blaszk, 2015). This being the case, it was hypothesized that teaching practices might exist as a community of practice within which student-teachers in interaction with these different people would be supported in their professional development. The aim of the qualitative research reported in this paper was to discover how the student-teachers in a particular institution perceived their teaching practices and whether or not those practices could be viewed as a community of practice that supported the students.
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