Regulating collaboration in teacher education

Abstract

Collaboration in teacher education can be seen as a way to prepare student teachers for future social practices at school. When people collaborate with each other, they have to regulate their collaboration. In the Dutch teacher education programme that was investigated, student teachers were members of different types of groups, each of which had its own purpose and curriculum and required a certain amount of collaboration. We studied the ways in which teacher educators and student teachers together regulated collaboration in each of these types of groups. We concluded that regulating collaboration is not yet an explicit learning aim in this programme, while it is important for student teachers to learn how to direct and support collaboration in a group.