Piloting a Coteaching Model in Preservice Teacher Education

• In Event: Teacher Professional Development and Practice

Abstract

This submission relates specifically to the conference theme in that it pilots a model for coteaching, based on firm educational foundations, which combines theoretical contributions from Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (ZPD) and other sociocultural models of coteaching. Coteaching research and practice has suffered from lack of a model which provides a structure of how to coteach. The context for this empirical study is initial teacher education; specifically, the development of pre-service primary teachers’ confidence and ability to teach primary science through an innovative program in which preservice teachers share expertise as they coplan, coteach and coevalute lessons with experienced cooperating teachers for an afternoon per week over a period of seven weeks as part of their school experience placement.

Authors

• Colette Murphy, Trinity College Dublin

• John McCullagh

• Andrea Doherty