Supervisors’ guidance of PETE students’ reflections at practicum: creating conditions for different learning journeys

ABSTRACT

Physical education teacher education (PETE) students’ reflections on their practicums are influenced by how their supervisors guide them. Supervisors often evaluate and discuss PETE students’ teaching by guiding their focus on essential aspects to consider. This exploratory case study focuses on how supervisors’ guiding styles in reflective conversations affect how PETE students make meaning of their teaching. Reflective practitioners, in this case PETE students, make sense of practical situations from their own perspectives as part of their teaching practice. Supervisors’ guidance is essential here, because it can change PETE students’ understanding by (re)directing their attention to meaningful aspects when framing their teaching and help them to examine it from new perspectives. However, the findings indicate that supervisors’ various guidance affect how PETE students experience their learning journeys during practicum. In this study, the participating PETE students’ experiences of practicum differed: either they experienced a controlled journey that restricted their teaching due to predefined rules and condemning attitude toward pupils, or they experienced an adventurous journey that enabled them to find their own paths as a teachers.

KEYWORDS:

• Reflective conversations
• ‘act of pointing’
• school-placements
• experiences
• reflection
• Educative/non-educative/mis-educative

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Swedish Research Council [2018-03626] .

Notes on contributors

Emil Johansson

Emil Johansson is a doctoral student in Educational work at Dalarna University. Emil’s research interest focuses on the concept of reflection and reflective practice in educational settings. Generally, Emil focuses on teacher education, particularly on physical education teacher education, in his research. Furthermore, Emil has an educational interest in how to stimulate student teachers’ reflections and what teacher educators can encourage them to focus on when they reflect.