Source: Teaching and Teacher Education, Volume 25, Issue 1, January 2009, Pages 176-180
(Reviewed by the Portal Team)
The greatest benefit of teacher preparation programs is field-related training where pre-service teachers contextualize the learned knowledge and theories with tasks and students during training. This preliminary study is based on the collaboration between a teacher training program and an elementary school. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect that exposure to various sources of teacher efficacy has on pre-service teachers in Taiwan. It also attempted to answer the question: How does the exposure to various sources of teacher efficacy affect the confidence level of pre-service elementary teachers in Taiwan?
26 pre-service teachers (5 male and 21 female), aged from 22 to 26 years with Chinese as their native language, enrolled in a Language Teaching Methods course and participated in this study. This teacher training program is operating in a national context in orientation and mainly serves local teachers in different fields of subjects. Most participants in this study did not have much experience in teaching English as a foreign language. Those who had limited experience would be working as private tutors in language institutions.
Discussion and conclusion
The results of this study show some influences of classroom experience and group discussions on the teaching efficacy of this group of pre-service teachers. Pre-service teachers demonstrated a higher level of PTE after the classroom experience and group discussions.
In conclusion, the results of this preliminary study show the value of collaboration between the community and the training program in providing a hands-on experience for pre-service teachers. This study also shows the positive effect dialogue has in a group setting for developing the level of teaching efficacy of such a group of teachers.