Pre-service teachers’ perceptions of the benefits of peer review

Abstract

The paper draws initially on theoretical literature describing schools and universities as, necessarily, dialogic learning communities, which is then applied to an investigation into the use of peer review in teacher education in an Australian university. The empirical research described was completed with pre-service teachers of religious education, and it explores the implications for the learning of those pre-service teachers in a university and in school settings. Advantages of peer review by pre-service teachers include helping them to identify, understand and address their strengths and limitations. The work was described as a positive experience, supporting the expectations of the authors that it could and should be positive, despite some of the previous literature in the field emphasising negative experiences of peer review. Activities used for this research were themselves models of professional learning, representing a ‘research attitude’ of the pre-service teachers to their own work. That can in turn be applied to the research attitude of university tutors and, just as significantly, of teachers and pupils in schools. Pre-service teachers were seeing themselves as researchers in learning communities, and were able to understand how they might transfer this approach into the classrooms in which they would be working. Although a small-scale piece of empirical research, it nevertheless helps to clarify some of the ways in which teacher education can model, and influence, the nature of schools as learning communities.

Keywords:

• dialogue
• peer review
• Australia
• learning community