The Views of Pre-Service Teachers at an Internship High School on Pedagogical Formation Program in Turkey

Abstract

A variety of teacher training system was implemented in Turkey until today. One of these systems is pedagogical formation training. The aim of this study was to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the pedagogical formation training according to the opinions of pre-service teachers and the experiences during the pedagogical formation training, to gather information about whether these experiences contributed to their teaching, and to evaluate the place of the pedagogical formation training in teacher employment in the light of this information. The research was carried out using an interview technique of qualitative analysis methods. The study group comprised of 20 pre-service teachers from different undergraduate programs, and they participated in a 14-weekinternship program at a high school in Ankara during the 2017-2018 academic year as a requirement for a training course. Content analysis method was used for data analysis. As a result of the research, the pre-service teachers stated that they found the internship training in practice schools as useful for future teaching lives, but they did not find the theoretical training given in the classes useful for various reasons. They considered that there are some weak points of the program: the duration of the formation course is short, lessons are late in the evening, classes are crowded, and the teaching staff have negative effects on the students: they are indifferent, and there are almost the same topics in each lesson. This means that they were mostly not satisfied with its overall quality, and so its operability was enough. Like some of the suggestions, it is recommended that duration of the program should be extended to a long period, and the instructors should be selected from those who can give energy to the class, have communication skills, can create discipline in the classroom, and have experience in traditional classroom teaching.

Differentiated Instruction between Application and Constraints: Teachers’ Perspective

“…This raises concern, in fact, about the quality of such training workshops and the possible outcomes; being theoretical would weaken teachers' opportunities to transform these workshops into real practices. Filiz and Durnali (2019) supported the hands-on training in schools and believed it would be more useful for acquiring skills, abilities and educational strategies to apply in the future. There is no benefit from theoretical training if there is no practical application on the ground.…”

“…On the other hand, Siam and Al-Natour (2016) did not report any statistically significant differences between the degree of teachers' use of differentiated instruction and years of experience. While Al-Harbi (2017) and Al-Bultan (2017) found no relationship between the variables of years of experience and scientific specialization and the degree to which teachers apply differentiated instruction, Al-Bultan (2017) and Filiz and Durnali (2019) reported statistically significant differences due to training courses. Christian (2005) confirmed the impact of a training program on using differentiated instruction where the results showed an improvement in teachers' performance in favor of teachers who did undergo training compared to those who did not.…”

Teaching Innovation in the Development of Professional Practices: Use of the Collaborative Blog

“…The improvement proposals differed from those of the MAES students who proposed to extend the duration of the practices [55][56][57], although they also affected temporal aspects of the practices. However, in this aspect, they were in line with [58][59][60][61][62], since in both studies, the student proposed to extend the duration of the practices, indicating a greater learning during them.…”

Students’ Reflection on the Experience in Online School Internship Program Based on Experiential Learning

“…In addition, students also get new information that was not given during lectures. Students gain a lot of experiences through internships at school, such as how to communicate, carry out learning, solve problems, and be aware of student behavior (Filiz & Durnali, 2019).…”