High-quality practicum – according to teacher education students on their practicum at partnership schools

ABSTRACT

This article explores how teacher education students perceive high-quality practicum. Data were collected through group interviews with students while in practicum at partnership schools and analysed thematically within the context of qualification, socialisation, and subjectification as goals of education. The findings show that students perceive high-quality practicum as inclusive, qualifying, and facilitative for developing professional teacher identity. Furthermore, the findings show that students experience a considerable difference in quality between practicum at partnership schools and other schools. A practicum that maintains high quality can be outlined by building on experiences from practicum at partnership schools.

KEYWORDS:

• Practicum
• teacher education
• partnership
• teacher training

Introduction

Acquiring practical skills and experience is a significant part of teacher education. The practicum is an integrated part of teacher education and takes place in an arena where scholarly and didactic knowledge and practical skills are expressed during teaching (Zeichner 2010). The teacher’s knowledge base consists of elements from various fields of knowledge integrated with practical syntheses (Grimen 2008; Sullivan and Rosin 2008). It is during a teacher’s practicum that connections between the various aspects of their knowledge are established since they will have found it necessary to do so in order to conduct specific tasks, and not because these connections are necessarily theoretically sound. Therefore, the character of the practical task, in many ways, decides what knowledge elements are appropriate to tie together (Grimen 2008). Creating an experience of totality and coherence among fields of knowledge has been a challenge for teacher education programmes (Hammerness 2006, 2013; Resch, Schrittesser, and Knapp 2022). This places great demands on the practicum to be of high quality and that the teacher education students are not left to build the connections between the various fields of knowledge and actions during their practicum by themselves (Allen and Wright 2013; Arvaja, Sarja, and Rönnberg 2022).

The practicum is where teacher education students are supposed to develop their teacher competence and discover who they are as executive teachers (Gallchóir, O’Flaherty, and Hinchion 2018; Stenberg and Maaranen 2022). This is not decided by personal aspects alone but also by contextual factors in the practicum, such as fellow teacher education students, the mentor, mentoring, framework factors, and the teacher education programme (Avalos 2011; Mulryan-Kyne 2021; Waber, Hagenauer, and de Zordo 2022). Research shows that the quality of the practicum greatly impacts the development of teacher competence. Opportunity for critical reflection (Anspal, Eisenschmidt, and Löfström 2011; Horgan and Gardiner-Hyland 2019), the experience of affiliation (Caires, Almeida, and Vieira 2012), high-quality supervision (Johnston 2010; Sandvik et al. 2019), and relations with the practicum teacher (Cohen, Hoz, and Kaplan 2013; Stewart and Jansky 2022; Waber, Hagenauer, and de Zordo 2022) all affect the teacher education students’ professional development. Various inquiries show that teacher education students highly value practice in general (e.g. Darling-Hammond 2014; Korthagen 2010) but not necessarily the training they receive during practice periods (Høgheim and Jenssen 2022; Trent 2011). Both the quality of the mentoring and the relationship between the teacher education student and their mentor have a decisive influence on the impression of the practicum being of high quality (Cohen, Hoz, and Kaplan 2013; Hagenauer, Waber, and de Zordo 2021; Waber, Hagenauer, and de Zordo 2022). It is argued that it is vital for students to receive constructive feedback and encouragement to be critical of their work and that enough time is earmarked for reflection and learning of one’s teaching together with the mentor (Horgan and Gardiner-Hyland 2019; Varol et al. 2023). Research has also shown that it is essential to be allowed to try out an authentic work context (Bogo 2006; Dreer 2020) and to gain experience with other parts of the role of a teacher than just classroom teaching (Cohen, Hoz, and Kaplan 2013; Fuentes-Abeledo et al. 2020)

According to analyses by Cochran-Smith (2004), teacher education programmes have gone through various eras, from emphasising teaching methods and technical skills to emphasising scholarly knowledge and foundations for lifelong learning, as well as emphasising pupils’ learning outcomes. Rather than one thing substituting another, new demands are added to already existing demands. Thus, the competence teacher education students should acquire is both composed and complex. These tasks’ amount and range might lead to lower psychological detachment (Dreer 2020), limit their view of teaching, and reduce their training potential (Fuentes-Abeledo et al. 2020).

Collaboration between teacher education lecturers and mentors to create a shared vision and ideals for teacher education has positively impacted teacher education students’ learning and their practice (K. Hammerness 2006). Hammerness (2013) found that Norwegian teacher education programmes lacked a clear and shared vision. She also found that some teacher education lecturers may have their own vision for their teaching, which is primarily motivated by a desire to disseminate their subject of expertise, and not with making any relation of what they teach to how the teacher education students may later teach this subject in a real-life school setting. Theory and practice should be understood as something other than a dichotomy (Grimen 2008). Relating theoretical knowledge to practical experiences impacts whether the teacher education students see the value of theoretical knowledge for the execution of the teaching profession and is a prerequisite for developing teacher competence (I. Hatlevik and Smeby 2015; Uibu et al. 2023). Through self-reflection and feedback during supervision sessions, the practicum must pave the way for the experience of coherence and meaning and substantiate the relevance of the various content components of teacher education (Arvaja, Sarja, and Rönnberg 2022; Dreer 2020).

Several teacher education institutions and practice schools have established partnerships to improve collaboration and coherence within teacher education. A ‘partnership is a strategy to structure, organise, strengthen and professionalise teacher education’ (Lillejord and Børte 2016, 555). There is great potential within these partnerships to support students’ professional development (Avalos 2011; Darling-Hammond 2010; White, Timmermans, and Dickerson 2022), and Reynolds, Ross, and Rakow (2002) found that newly qualified teachers that had their practicum in partnership schools were more satisfied with their education than other newly qualified teachers.

Research on the profession has shown a relationship between the quality of the training, the students’ effort, and learning outcomes (Billett 2014; Eraut 2010; Gallchóir, O’Flaherty, and Hinchion 2018). Furthermore, the skills and knowledge that teacher education students acquire during their education and their professional competence experience significantly influence their future experience of their competence as teachers (I. K. R. Hatlevik 2017; Korthagen, Loughran, and Russell 2006; Weidlich and Kalz 2023). We have found a vast number of studies of practicum in teacher education (e.g. Billett 2014; Fuentes-Abeledo et al. 2020), but only a few that examine teacher education students’ perception and experience of quality in their practicum (e.g. Bogo 2006), and no such studies related to Norwegian teacher education for primary and lower secondary school. We anticipate that the teacher education students’ experiences in their practicum influence their view of the profession (Korthagen, Loughran, and Russell 2006). Therefore, we have chosen to examine how teacher education students in practicum at six partnership schools reflect on what a high-quality practicum looks like, guided by the following research question: What do teacher education students in partnership schools perceive as a high-quality practicum?

Framework

Teacher quality is not clearly defined in Norway (Smith 2021) and can be a slippery concept. Biesta (2010) believes that to find an answer to teacher quality, there is a need to connect with the question of purpose in education, which Biesta describes as qualification, socialisation, and subjectification.

The primary function of teacher education is to qualify students to become teachers by offering them opportunities to gain the knowledge and skills necessary to master and fulfil the teaching profession. Such qualifications can be training on specific academic or didactic skills and general topics such as creating a reflection, citizenship, and life mastery (Biesta 2010). In several European countries, a competence-based approach has been advancing, moving the focus from the teacher’s knowledge to the teacher’s ability to act (Heilbronn 2008). Biesta (2015) suggests that the competence-based approach that dominates teacher education in several countries may lead to a more practical and holistic education that embraces knowledge, skills, and actions. On the other hand, it may have the opposite effect if the emphasis is put on ‘performance, standards, measurement, and control, thus reducing and ultimately undermining the agency of teachers’ (Biesta 2015, 677). How we understand Biesta’s use of ‘qualification’ implies a reflective perception of how the combination of knowledge, skills and actions supports the goal of education.

Education has a socialising purpose as well. As a teacher, one works in various social and cultural communities. The practicum offers students early experiences with various workplace cultures and practice communities. For example, students can experience how teachers interact at team and plenary meetings and how one talks about and with parents. Such experiences are value-based, have a socialising effect on the students, and influence their future practice (Biesta 2010). Therefore, it will be necessary for the teacher education programmes also to be acquainted with values and cultures that dominate the professional communities at schools where teacher education students have practicum periods.

The third important goal Biesta highlights is subjectification. Subjectification is about developing one’s professionality. A teacher must make many choices every day. These choices cannot be planned or picked from a particular repertoire (Biesta 2015) but require the teacher to exercise discretion and actively show independence in each situation. The teacher must be the subject of the actions made. Biesta (2010, 2015) argues for subjectification as a process that paves the way for students to become more autonomous and independent in their thinking and acting. This goal is about liberty and freedom and the responsibility that this liberty brings with it.

In a high-quality practicum, the teacher education students will gain experience with qualification, socialisation, and subjectification. Furthermore, such a practicum will pave the way for the teacher education students to exercise their discretion and reflect upon their actions. A practicum is about both the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of teaching and about handling classroom situations as they occur; however, it is also about acquiring tools for lifelong professional development that sees students as subjects of their own lives, not as objects of educational interventions (Biesta 2015). Practicum can affect actions and attitudes on an individual, organisational, and societal level.

Context

The teacher education students that participated in this study were 3rd, and 5th-year students enrolled in the general teacher education programme (GTEP) at an institution for higher education in Norway. The Norwegian GTEP has two possible programmes the student can choose between when applying for enrolment. These programmes are for teacher education for grades 1–7 and 5–10. The practicum in the Norwegian GTEP consists of 110 days of supervised and assessed compulsory school practice and five days of observational practice, which in the institution where this study takes place, is distributed as follows (See Table 1):

Table 1. Distribution of practicum in the two GTEPs in which the participating students are enrolled.

Year\Semester	Autumn	Spring
1st	3 weeks Incl. three days of observational practice	3 weeks
2nd	3 weeks Incl. two days of observational practice	3 weeks
3rd	2 weeks	3 weeks
4th	None	3 weeks
5th	3 weeks	None

Observational practice occurs early in the programme, where the students can get to know the practice class and be acquainted with the practice teacher’s teaching. Practicum is carried out in groups of 2–4 students, called a practice group. The practice group follows a mentor (from the practice school) and shares in teaching the subjects the mentor usually teaches. The students are assigned to a new practice group, a new mentor and a new (practice) school each year of study. The partnership schools do not influence what students are assigned to them. Each student will usually have gone through a practicum at five different schools throughout their studies.

The practicum schools’ daily activity forms the basis of the student’s practicum. However, the GTEP gives the students some assignments or tasks to conduct during each semester’s practicum. In addition, the mentor emphasises specific themes during the practicum period, like the teacher’s role, the role of a pupil, or the school’s organisation. The headteacher can appoint any teacher to be a mentor. There is no requirement for formal education in counselling, and a significant part of the mentors in Norwegian practicum schools do not have formal education as mentors. Contrarily, at the partnership schools, most mentors have formal education as mentors. This means that the knowledge about and experience with mentoring varies greatly. There are no formal guidelines for how mentors should execute their tasks, so each mentor has a great deal of freedom in their interpretation and execution of their role.

The interviews of the students took place in the middle of a practicum period at a partnership school. Being a partnership school implies working closely with the teacher education institution to strengthen, develop and professionalise the practicum and the teacher education programmes. The partnership schools and the teacher education institution work together to develop practicum and determine how cooperation should be between teacher education and practicum. This equal-based collaboration becomes visible through joint meetings where various aspects regarding practicum are paramount, such as, for instance, development of assessment criteria, work requirements, and exchange of teacher resources.

Method

We chose to employ focus group interviews since such an approach is suitable for examining multiple participants’ experiences and perceptions (Brinkmann and Kvale 2015; Krueger and Casey 2015). In addition, the focus group interview offers data where the discussions among the participants are broad and varied in their scope. Occasionally, conversations were guided by the participants’ associations, thoughts, and sudden utterances. The group interviews were conducted in October and November 2021 at the six partnership schools where the students had their practicum period at that time. Each focus group consisted of 2–4 students and a total of 27 participated, representing nine practice groups. The practice groups, and thereby the students, were chosen by the six schools. The focus group interviews lasted 45–60 minutes and were recorded and fully transcribed. The researchers teach at the teacher education institution but were not involved in teaching with any of the students and had no influence on what practice groups the partnership schools selected for the interviews. The only influence we had was that the practice groups selected by the partnership schools did not consist of first-year students because first-year students would need to gain experience to relate to their partnership school experience.

Since the focus group interview is an appropriate approach to understanding how students construct their experiences and expectations (Brinkmann and Kvale 2015) within a teacher education programme, we invited each group of students to share their experiences and express their viewpoints, perspectives and concerns around the following question: What is a high-quality practicum to you? We did not want to define quality for the participating students or create a frame for the concept of quality but left it for them within each focus group to provide the concept with content. All interviewed groups had explicit thoughts about the question we raised, and the conversations within each group were easy to follow. Both researchers participated in the focus group interview sessions and facilitated the group’s conversation with ad hoc follow-up questions when further elaboration would enrich the data collected. We are both experienced teacher educators, and we emphasised this to the students to clarify our interest in their experiences and perceptions by being active listeners and emotionally attentive. This is particularly important in a focus group interview to create an atmosphere where the informants can express themselves freely and participate in creating a joint construction of meaning (Krueger and Casey 2015). Our participation in the focus group interviews will have influenced the discussion since we addressed the follow-up questions. Therefore, we made sure not to interrupt when students were talking or discussing issues with each other and only raised follow-up questions in cases of ‘radio silence’ in the group.

Thematic analysis was applied to the transcribed data, a systematic process for identifying, analysing, and interpreting patterns of shared meaning guided by the research question (Clarke and Braun 2017). First, we both read the transcripts. After the preliminary readings of the transcripts, we independently labelled the raw data with codes related to the aim of the study. However, we were also open to associations the students brought up in the interviews. Then, we agreed through a joint phase of comparing and interpretative negotiation upon grouping individually coded sequences within Biesta’s (2010) three categories: qualification (when the students were concerned with the acquisition or testing of knowledge), socialising (when the student talked about relationships and the need for inclusion), and subjectification (when the students highlighted empowerment and professional space). In a round of joint analysis of the grouped sequences, guided by the aim of exploring how teacher education students perceive high-quality practicum, we identified four themes that needed to be addressed. Quotations were then selected to illustrate the findings. The interviews provided rich data, comprising a range of experiences and expectations through personal stories and joint constructions of meaning.

To sum up, it was in this study of absolute importance for us to be aware of our roles as researchers and the questions of validity and reliability, given that we were moderators of the focus group interviews, in which we brought our experience from the field of teacher education. According to Brinkmann and Kvale (2015), knowledge about what is being researched and expertise in the field of study are prerequisites for viable interpretations. However, we ensured we did not interfere or participate in the discussions. We sought to ask open-ended questions and ensured that all voices were heard, and that no single student should dominate the interview. We ended each interview by having the students verify our summary comments (Krueger and Casey 2015).

Findings

The students expressed that the partnership schools have closer collaboration with the teacher education programmes, are more development-orientated, and seem more professional in several areas compared to other grade schools used for practicum periods. The students used experiences from previous practicum periods to describe how differently they were experiencing the practicum at the partnership schools. Specific core factors the students emphasise are the experience of being included, practicum mentors and mentoring during practicum, professional development in theory and practice, and work requirements during the practicum period.

The experience of being included

It means a lot for the students that they feel welcome at the practicum school and are included in the community. At the partnership schools, they are given a guided tour, access to a room where they can work during the practicum period, and access to digital learning resources that require personal usernames and passwords. Some students say that during a previous practicum at another school, they first got access to internet resources towards the end of the first week. Under such circumstances, the students did not feel significant or valued, and as one student put it: ‘It makes it difficult to come well prepared’.

During the interview, stories emerged from previous practicum periods, where some students felt neglected and that they were a nuisance. They have experienced not being included in daily life at the school, and some even encountered teachers who did not greet them during the day. Such experiences made one student exclaim: ‘I don’t want to work at a school with a culture like that’. These experiences contrast with the experiences at the partnership schools. One student group told us they were included in several areas: ‘But it is so [the student’s emphasis] important that you feel welcome. Here we played volleyball in the afternoon with colleagues. They say: “Come on, join us at volleyball!” It’s their way of including us, and it’s really nice’. The students want to feel seen and acknowledged and to gain access to a professional community. Inclusion is vital in the students’ perception of a high-quality practicum.

Practicum mentors and mentoring during practicum

The students want their practicum to be an arena where they are given responsibility and opportunities to try various teaching approaches, and tools, gain valuable experiences and discover who they are as teachers. One student stressed that ‘it’s at this stage that we ought to find out who we are as teachers before we start to work as certified teachers’.

The students identify the practicum mentor as the factor with the most influence on their practicum and by far the factor that decides how much space and opportunity the students have to try out something they are curious about in their teaching, to show independence, and to get to know themselves as teachers. The students see the high-quality practicum mentor as someone who demands and expects things of students clearly and makes them reflect on the choices they have made or are about to make. The high-quality practicum mentor is interested in the student’s development and prioritises time and space for trials and reflections. However, the students signalled that there is a difference between ideal and reality. They shared experiences from previous practicum periods where practicum mentors’ interest in them seemed to fade away, providing examples of practicum mentors that avoid teaching and mentoring, disappear, or use the students as replacement teachers while they do something else: ‘At my previous practicum school, we did not receive any mentoring. We had to search for practicum mentors to get some guidance. That was really weak, actually’, said one. Another extreme example is practicum mentors with fixed and rigid recipes regarding what works and do not allow other methods or approaches to teaching. The students do not give such practicum mentors much credit. One student referred to such an experience in the following way: ‘He spent much time explaining what he thought we should do about content, form, and structure, and then we, in a way, found it difficult to turn down his suggestions. After all, we were eager to get positive responses to what we did in our practicum’. The student experienced a tension between the desire to try out something he was curious about and the perceived need to please the practicum mentor.

The impact of the practicum mentor goes beyond didactic choices and teaching priorities. Even though none of the students mentions practicum mentors as role models, we get the impression that practicum mentors’ attitudes may occasionally influence the students. For example, one group of students mentioned that in previous practicum periods, they had worked with practicum mentors who had a strained relationship with the teacher education institutions: ‘They are often a bit negative towards the teacher education programmes and the lecturers we have at the campus. And that may also make us feel negative’. Such statements mirror the attitudes of practicum mentors towards teacher education, attitudes which the teacher education students may adopt themselves.

According to the students, a high-quality practicum has mentoring that paves the way for reflections where the entire student group is involved in the mentoring. The students want the student responsible for the teaching session to be the first to speak. The practicum mentor should wait with his point of view until all students in the practicum group have given their opinions and feedback: ‘[…] because sometimes I feel that it is the practicum mentor who talks all the time, and that is not how it is supposed to be’. However, such experiences seem not necessarily the case at partnership schools. In one of the interviews, the students illustrated how they experience a high-quality reflection in the present practice period in the following way: ‘If some pupils’ group work has not worked out that well, then a high-quality practicum mentor will make the students think: ‘Why did the group work not work well’, ‘What can we do in another way?’, ‘Should we make bigger or smaller groups?’ We analyse what went wrong, where it went wrong, and why. We do not just cut out group work from our alternatives’. The students find it instructive and valuable to reflect and learn from ‘mistakes’ and appreciate wiggle room for trial and error.

The students want frank and explicit feedback on their planning and teaching, not glassy and contentless feedback like, for instance, ‘That was good’ or ‘It was a fine lesson’. Instead, they call for mentoring that is coherent with the effort they have put into preparation and execution and that the feedback is precise enough to tell them what to emphasise further, either by strengthening, adjusting, or changing their methods. A student said this: ‘We know that we are not perfect. We are in a development process where everybody expects to get feedback and be told how others experienced our work and reflect on our performance. We want to improve’. We can take from this that the students find it essential for the practicum mentor not to have a narrow opinion about what is right or the right thing to do. ‘A practicum mentor ought to give you, and who you are [the student’s emphasis], guidance so that you may become and stay conscious about your choices’, one student stated. During some of the interviews, some strong examples of experiences from previous practicum periods illustrate the importance of feedback from the practicum mentor, how this may influence the student’s motivation for further studies, and why it was so easy for the students to pinpoint what is not high-quality practicum mentoring:

Last year the mentoring was horrible and cruel. I almost ended my studies because I, frankly speaking, hated it. I found it downright awful, and I felt useless. We received nothing but bad feedback and were told repeatedly that we made mistakes and that what we planned and tried did not work. However, the practicum periods in my first year provided me with excellent mentoring, where both positive aspects and what could be worked with were visualised and reflected on. So, mentoring has a major influence.

This spontaneous utterance was imminently commented on by another student:

I had an experience similar to yours from a previous practicum. During the practicum period, I felt I was to be a miserable teacher due to the feedback from the mentor. So, I thought about dropping out. However, now, when I receive positive feedback once again, I feel and understand that I was okay!

All in all, the students have varied experiences from practicum. They illustrate a mentoring practice that seems arbitrary and may have extreme variations from practicum school to partnership school, from indifferent to well-planned, and from oppressive to edifying. One student talked about a practicum mentor who usually started each mentoring session with, ‘Well, I don’t really know what we are supposed to talk about today’, and said with a sigh that ‘it almost seems that some practicum mentors could have benefitted from a template’. The same conclusion appeared in another interview: ‘In a way, I feel there lacks a universal template about what to expect from a practicum mentor and a practicum school. I feel that it is left for each practicum mentor to orchestrate the mentoring how they believe it should be done or find convenient’. It all amounts to an impression among students that the practicum mentor one will be assigned is random, and several students used the word ‘luck’ when describing practicum mentors. A 5th-year student summed up his argument: ‘What I do not [the student’s emphasis] want, so to speak, is that the quality of your teacher education should depend on how lucky you are with the practicum mentors’.

Professional development in theory and in practice

The students noted that a practicum is of high quality when the teaching on campus and the practical training complement each other, and the distinction between theory and practice is not too great:

Then I feel a connection between the concepts and theories we learn about and the practicum itself. When the practicum mentors are familiar with them [concepts and theories] and apply them in the school’s everyday activities, it becomes … Aha, that is what they mean by that theory or that concept … As soon as they [practicum mentors] can justify why they do so and so, and they are up-to-date on research or theories … then I feel the effect of the practicum increases significantly.

At one of the partnership schools, students have found that the practicum mentor is well-acquainted with their teacher education programme. According to the students, this has increased the quality of the practicum experience. One student put it this way: ‘When on practicum, you might feel a great disconnect between being on practicum and being at the campus. It is two different worlds. But now, in this [practicum] period, I do not feel like that’. The student then explained that the practicum mentor is up-to-date with content from the teacher education programme and uses professional concepts that the students find helpful when they discuss questions of ethics related to the teaching profession. This shows that when the practicum mentors are familiar with what the students learn on campus, they are better prepared to help them create coherence between theory and practice and more holistic education.

The experienced students highlight the necessity of getting a realistic impression of the teaching profession through the practicum. They want to become acquainted with a broader spectrum of teachers’ tasks, roles, and situations, not just what is related to classroom activity. The students find the content of the practicum periods to be similar year to year, mainly consisting of planning and conducting teaching. A 5th-year student says: Teaching is only a small part of the teacher profession […], and I feel I lack that knowledge about what goes on besides teaching. For example, I find it difficult to approach those pupils that don’t like school because of things beyond subject matter knowledge. In concert, students from several interviews shared examples of facets of the practicum that they find are given too little priority: cooperation with parents, conversations with pupils, long-term planning, participation at plenary staff meetings, acquaintance with the development of individual education plans for pupils, diagnoses, plans for handling diversity. This part of the practicum is not that much different at the partnership schools compared to other schools the students have experienced in their practicum. One explanation for this might be that the course plans for the practicum include guides for the content of the practicum periods.

Observation of teaching is also an issue among the interview students, and their opinions vary. While students in the middle of their education argue that they do not learn much from observing and prefer to teach as much as possible, a group of 5th-year students argue otherwise. They say they learn a lot from observing and observing in different ways when they reach the end of their education. One student says: Now we have more knowledge. Those two [points at two other students] have Norwegian as their master’s subject, while I have physical education. The subjects colour how we observe things. Even if we observe in the same lesson, we bring different thoughts to the subsequent discussion with our practicum mentor, and I find that interesting.

Work requirements

The work requirements are one thing that influences the experience and learning during a practicum that all student groups highlighted. The work requirements are attached to on-campus subjects and are mandatory assignments that must be done during the practicum period and are a prerequisite to qualify for the examination. The work requirements are often designed as a test of specific teaching plans or methods or a collection of information. The number of work requirements varies from one practicum period to another. Many students have found work requirements to be a disruptive element and have reduced the learning process in the practicum. The work requirement is particularly challenging for the students when the design, theme, or scope does not fit the prevailing long-term plans that the practicum mentor uses for teaching in the assigned class. One student group shared that they brought four work requirements to their practicum the preceding year: ‘The work requirements dictated our teaching. I do not think that work requirements are inherently positive unless they are easy to incorporate into the plans used by the practicum school’. When asked what they learned from working with the work requirements, one of the students replied: ‘Nothing. I did the work requirements for my lecturer on campus, not because there was anything to learn from it’.

The students find work requirements useful and an excellent way to learn while on their practicum if they are open and not narrowed down to a specific theme or grade. Examples of such work requirements are, according to the students: a professional reflection log, open assignments about reading strategies, and other assignments where students may reflect on subject-related questions without having to change plans made by the practicum school. Some students explained that if there is a difference between the practicum school plans and the work requirement, they feel a tension between the practicum school and the teacher education programme. Several students suggest that the work requirements should be designed jointly by lecturers from the teacher education programme and practicum mentors. This is a part of the collaboration between the teacher education institution and the partnership schools that are in progress, as emphasised in the Context paragraph.

Discussion

The students in our study clearly express that practicum is an arena from which they want to learn as much as possible. A practicum seems to have more excellent value for them than just passing the teacher education’s formal requirements for the practicum. They are far more concerned with gaining experiences they will bring into the teaching profession (Høgheim and Jenssen 2022; Korthagen, Loughran, and Russell 2006; Stenberg and Maaranen 2022). The students believe that a practicum may be a good venue for learning where various knowledge elements are expressed through teaching. The students find it demanding to create coherence and totality in teacher education, which ought to be a theme in a high-quality practicum. Biesta’s (2010, 2015) claims that to develop quality, it is necessary to connect with the question of purpose in teacher education and uses the concepts of qualification, socialisation, and subjectification to identify these purposes. These three concepts map well to discuss teacher education students’ perception of what makes a high-quality practicum. We will first discuss their perception of these three areas and then use these discussions to discuss the article’s research question.

Socialisation

An essential part of the practicum is providing the students with professional community experiences that give access to the teacher role in general and the working relations at each practicum school in particular (Caires, Almeida, and Vieira 2012). In our study, the students say they are incorporated into such a community socially and professionally. All necessary equipment and access to digital resources are available and ready when the practicum period starts. Being within such an organisational structure lays a professional expectation on the students that they appreciate. Being included means a lot to the students and makes them feel like a part of the professional community. This impression bubbles to the surface several times during the interviews, for example, when ‘we’ is used when discussing or explaining routines and customs at the practicum school. Such experiences of belonging and having a relationship with practicum mentors and colleagues influence the students’ professional development significantly (Cohen, Hoz, and Kaplan 2013; Hagenauer, Waber, and de Zordo 2021; Waber, Hagenauer, and de Zordo 2022).

How the students are met at the practicum school influences their experience of what makes a high-quality practicum (Avalos 2011; Waber, Hagenauer, and de Zordo 2022). The students in our study have experiences from previous practicum periods, which strongly contrast with the practicum priorities at the partnership schools. For example, some students refer to previous practicum experiences where teachers at the practicum school did not greet them or access to digital platforms was not ready when they started their practicum period. Such experiences give the students a perception of being someone who is secondary to other colleagues, which runs contrary to the intention of the practicum (Universities Norway 2017). Previous research has shown that a practicum greatly influences the students’ experience of the teaching profession and their perception of the profession (I. K. R. Hatlevik 2017; Korthagen, Loughran, and Russell 2006; Weidlich and Kalz 2023). Therefore, ensuring that all practicum schools collectively develop the qualities expected from a high-quality practicum school should be a high-priority task for teacher education.

Furthermore, the socialising function of a practicum should pave the way for all students to develop an accurate impression of the teaching profession, both in general and at individual schools. With this in mind, they ought to be given access to meetings and forums where teachers discuss and interact with each other, and they should meet teachers who have clear expectations of them and consciousness about working at a practicum school. Unfortunately, the experiences shared by the students in this study show that this is only the case at some practicum schools. This is worrisome since the quality of education, student effort and learning outcomes are intertwined (Billett 2014; Eraut 2010; Gallchóir, O’Flaherty, and Hinchion 2018).

Qualification

The students in this study refer, along with other studies, to the practicum as an experience where they learn a lot. A practicum offers them the opportunity to test the knowledge they have acquired in on-campus teaching. The students find this connection between theory and practice useful, making the training relevant. Such a stance becomes apparent when a student says: ‘I have to know why I learn what I learn and how I am to use it as a teacher’. The relationship between relevance and usefulness reveals tension in education because there may be various understandings and views about what knowledge and skills are regarded as relevant and useful. An example of this is when 5th-year students describe observation during practicum positively. As experienced students with a master’s level in one subject, they argue that they have a more affluent professional foundation for observing than they had at the beginning of their education. This shows that 5th-year students have a different view about what is relevant and useful compared to when they were 1st-year students.

We find it remarkable that none of the students mentioned that they lack more professional or subject matter knowledge. This might be related to revising the Norwegian teacher education programmes into five-year master’s programmes, emphasising subject matter knowledge. On the other hand, the students call for a broader education in real-life professional situations. Most of them depict the practicum periods as one-sided without apparent progress. The students want experiences beyond planning, conducting, and evaluating lessons. Several students called for experiences in practicum with themes like cooperation with parents, conversations with pupils and conflict management. This may be interpreted as a wish for an educational programme that emphasises tasks and situations more similar to the ones they may encounter as qualified teachers (Bogo 2006; Dreer 2020). A less one-sided practicum may provide a broader basis of experience as a teacher and make the meeting with the teaching profession less harsh than several studies report new teachers’ initial time as a teacher in school (Farrell 2016).

The traditional tension between theory and practice in teacher education (Zeichner 2010), also felt by the students in our study earlier, is considered much weaker when they are on practicum at partnership schools. One practicum group spoke about a professionally up-to-date practicum mentor who knows what the students learn on campus and uses professional concepts in the mentoring sessions. The practicum mentor becomes an experienced ‘translator’, and according to the students, this contributes to creating connections between theory and practice. This study indicates that if the practicum becomes more ‘related to the theory’, it might help the students create coherence between theory and practice and a more holistic education.

The practicum groups all have an opinion about work requirements during practicum periods. The work requirements are a paramount coupling between on-campus teaching and the practicum to stimulate students to connect theory and practice. However, this is only sometimes how the students experience this situation. They have, on occasion, found that the work requirements paradoxically have reduced the outcome of the practicum period (Dreer 2020; Fuentes-Abeledo et al. 2020). This is mainly the case when the work requirements are designed without attention to the practicum school plans. When the work requirements are experienced in such a way, it might create friction between campus and practicum and counteract the totality and coherence that Zeichner (2010) calls for. Totality and coherence are challenging when only one party dictates the premises. Therefore, binding collaboration between campus and practicum seems necessary to develop work requirements with successful couplings between theory and practice that stimulate professional reflection and development (Resch, Schrittesser, and Knapp 2022; White, Timmermans, and Dickerson 2022).

Subjectification

Students regarded a high-quality practicum as one where they felt they were given responsibility and offered rich opportunities to try out ideas, theories, and methods and to fail while doing so. These qualities are desirable if the students develop independence and professional discretion, which is the dimension Biesta (2010) refers to as subjectification. The students say they want a practicum with frameworks and mentoring, where the practicum mentor is present and stimulates reflection and development. They want a practicum mentor who walks beside the students and opens up opportunities for them, not a guardian with all the correct answers. According to the students, high-quality mentoring should stimulate independence and subjectification and boost their ability to reflect on their work (Horgan and Gardiner-Hyland 2019; Sandvik et al. 2019). Thus, the students do not regard high-quality mentoring as something they receive from a more competent practicum mentor but as something they are an active part of.

The students in this study are 3rd and 5th-year students, and the most experienced students rate subjectification the highest. The valuation of subjectification might be a need that gradually grows alongside the students’ experiences development. Teacher education students will probably need more explicit frameworks and modelling at the beginning of their education programme. This suggests that the practicum should also emphasise progression for this dimension. However, according to the students’ experiences, this area is lacking. Subjectification might not be transferred from a practicum mentor but must be cultivated and developed by each student in line with the accumulation of experience. This requires the opportunity to try and fail without fearing it will influence the practicum mentor’s evaluation (Caires, Almeida, and Vieira 2012; Johnston 2010; Stenberg and Maaranen 2022). A gradual increase in subjectification depends on practicum mentors who acknowledge this need, have knowledge about it, and pave the way for students’ development of subjectification.

Practicum mentors balance qualification, socialisation, and subjectification

The students sincerely want to learn during their practicum. They want to be included in the practicum school’s handling of everyday matters, have the opportunity to make connections between theory and practice, and, last but not least, get to know themselves as teachers. Their experiences of what makes a high-quality practicum are mirrored in Biesta’s concepts about the goal of teacher education. According to the students, the practicum mentor is a crucial part of what makes a high-quality practicum. The practicum mentor’s ability to balance qualification, socialisation and subjectification more or less decides whether the students experience a practicum as high quality. Thus, the responsibility given to the practicum mentors is massive when we consider that there might be individual variations and wishes among the students within a practicum group (Stenberg and Maaranen 2022).

The students clearly express that a partnership school practicum is of higher quality than they have experienced at other non-partnership practicum schools. At some practicum schools, students have experienced that their attitudes have been influenced in a negative direction and even made students consider leaving the teacher education programme. Although the students have high expectations regarding practicum mentors, there are no examples in our study of students referring to practicum mentors as role models.

The vast variation of teacher education students’ experiences regarding practicum mentors and mentoring worries the students in our study. They interpret this variation as unfortunate and use the phrase ‘luck’ when referring to the likelihood of having a high-quality practicum. This vast variation led the students to call for some template for mentoring, and they encouraged the teacher education institution to have closer contact with the practicum schools and make efforts to increase practicum quality (Johnston 2010; Sandvik et al. 2019; Uibu et al. 2023). From this point of view, it is interesting that all students stress that the practicum experience at the partnership schools is of a higher quality than those they have experienced at non-partnership practicum schools. This difference may be because partnership schools collaborate closely with the teacher education programmes. No one benefits from a ‘class distinction’ among practicum schools. Therefore, the teacher education institution needs to find out what partnership schools do and do not do since they are referred to positively by the students. Collaboration is a keyword, and students found that if their practicum mentor uses professional concepts, which the students encounter in on-campus teaching, they can see how theory and practice come together. This practice leaves them with a high-quality learning outcome from the practicum.

Conclusions and implications

The students in this study have all experienced where, in their opinion, the practicum falls short. In this study, they have contributed to shedding light on several factors critical for a high-quality practicum, and by using Biesta’s framework of qualification, socialisation, and subjectification as a lens for analysis, the study provides a concrete methodological approach to assess and understand the quality of practicum experiences. This offers a useful heuristic for other researchers and practitioners interested in evaluating teacher education programmes.

This study offers insight into teacher education students’ perspectives regarding their practicum experiences and adds empirical support to theoretical frameworks that investigate what constitutes a high-quality practicum. The insight that students’ perceptions of what makes a practicum experience high quality can change over time adds a longitudinal dimension to the understanding of teacher education. Identifying this evolution in thinking contributes, in our opinion, to a more dynamic approach to evaluating teacher education programmes. In addition, the emphasis on the paramount influence of mentors in shaping the practicum experience contributes to the growing body of knowledge about how teacher education students and their mentors interact. It underscores the importance of high-quality mentors for the students’ professional development.

From the students’ perspective, the current teacher education may not adequately address the relationship between practicum and academic learning. This challenges teacher education, policymakers, and curriculum designers to integrate academic learning with practical teaching experiences better to create a more cohesive and relevant teacher education experience. By identifying areas in which current teacher education may be falling short from the students’ perspective, we advocate that this study informs about potential changes that could enhance the quality and relevance of teacher education and that the study’s findings can serve as a foundation for comparative research with other countries’ practices and experiences regarding teacher education practicum. This may reveal cultural and systemic differences that can further inform the international discourse on practicum in teacher education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes on contributors

Eirik S. Jenssen

Eirik S. Jenssen is a pedagogic professor at the Department of Pedagogy, Religion and Social Science at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Sogndal, Norway. The main areas of his research are student teachers’ professional development and inclusion.

Frode Olav Haara

Frode Olav Haara is an associated professor in mathematics at the Department of Language, Literature, Mathematics and Interpreting at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Sogndal, Norway. The main areas of his research are pedagogical entrepreneurship and mathematics education.