Publication details
Teach Live Czech Republic: Concept and Evaluation Results
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Teaching profession requires a university degree in the Czech Republic, yet only about half of the graduates of teaching programmes enter the profession and about a quarter of the teacher population remains unqualified. With the school system facing structural problems such as low proportion of new teachers entering the profession, high drop-out of beginner teachers, teacher shortages and high prevalence of the burn-out syndrome in the teacher population (Smetackova, 2017), the quality of the mainstream university teacher education and its capacity to prepare adequately competent teachers is put into question. In this context, the need for effective teacher preparation including sufficient reflected practical training has been emphasised. The innovative teacher training programme Teach Live addresses the above stated issues by the development of a post-graduate, fully accredited two-year training course for graduates of non-teaching university programmes. The goal of this programme is to prepare teachers with a considerable self-efficacy and a solid will to contribute to their pupil wellbeing in school while fully developing the potential of each pupil. Also teachers who have a high level of instructional efficacy function on the belief that difficult students are teachable through extra effort and appropriate techniques. (Bandura 1997 in Zulkosky). The programme design is based on the reflective teacher education model (Korthagen, 2011) and it consists of 370 hours of training with an integrated curriculum and reflective seminars and 380 hours of practice on two school placements (each one year long) - such amount of practical training is unique in the Czech context. At the schools, the student teachers cooperate with mentors who observe their classes and provide them with feedback. They also experience pair teaching and shared lesson planning. The mentors are provided with training and individual support and an emphasis is put on the development of school partnerships. The connection between the theory and practice is ensured by constant reflection on practice, series of case studies, video reflections, sitting in on the classes by the course lecturers and the personal development goal that students continuously work on throughout the programme. Teach Live aims to create a laboratory that will develop, test out and disseminate new models for teacher training. The results of the laboratory's work should offer inspiration, specific examples, well-grounded arguments and evidence to strengthen the preparation of future teachers. In the future, Teach Live also wishes to run bachelors and masters degree university programmes. It is therefore important to assess the quality of the teacher education programme. For this reason, an extensive longitudinal evaluation has been launched in January 2019. Previous external evaluation of the programme has identified the following key characteristics of the programme: respectful learning community, individual approach, democratic values, quality of instruction, experiential learning and emphasis on reflection. The evaluation research presented in this paper follows on these findings and further evaluates the quality and effectiveness of the programme by following research areas: How is the training programme evaluated by the participants and which of its components are of the highest benefit to the participants? How do Teach Live graduates compare to novice teachers / graduates of educational faculties in self-efficacy? How many of Teach Live graduate enter the teaching profession? How are the subjects taught by Teach Live graduates in primary and middle schools evaluated by their pupils in comparison to the given subject taught by other teachers in the past / in comparison to other school subjects? |
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