Opportunities to Learn to Become a Primary Teacher in Chile: The Perspective of Teacher Candidates

• In Event: Instruments for Measuring Quality in Teacher Education

Abstract

Objective
Empirical evidence available about the ‘black box’ of teacher education and about the opportunities that student teachers have to learn their profession is scarce in Chile and arguably across different countries as well. This paper describes the development of an online instrument to gather information about the learning experiences of prospective primary teachers in Chile, so as to prepare them to attain national standards for novice teachers.

Theoretical Framework
The instrument was based on the Chilean national standards for recently graduate teachers, seeking to identify and explore the Opportunities to Learn (OTL) that would support candidates to achieve those standards. It focuses upon opportunities to develop prospective teachers’ general pedagogic knowledge, content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman 1986, Darling Hammond et al., 2005), as well as upon enactment of practice (Grossman, et al., 2009).

Methods & Data Sources
We developed an online questionnaire to be answered by elementary teacher candidates in their last year of teacher education. We aimed to gather information about the OTL provided in initial teacher training at the national level, and to provide useful feedback to each teacher education institution. The survey included items asking students how extensive or how frequently they had certain learning experiences, categorized as academic (i.e. reading, attending lectures or participating in classroom debates) or more practical (i.e. enacting a teaching practice, role playing). Items were developed to capture teacher candidates’ preparation regarding key aspects of subject and pedagogic content knowledge in Language Arts, Maths, History, and Science. The instrument was completed by 740 teacher candidates in 27 institutions across Chile. After psychometric analysis, questions for the final instrument were selected. Only these were used to characterize common features of Chilean teacher education and to report back to institutions (then shared directly with each institution; not compared across institutions).

Results
The majority of institutions showed a similar pattern of OTL as perceived by teacher candidates. Candidates reported having more OTL in Language and Arts than in other subjects. In all the subjects, the nature of their learning experiences was predominantly theoretical (i.e. more lectures, reading and classroom debates than experiencing their teacher educator modeling a practice). Candidates were more likely to agree with statements that described opportunities to learn subjects, and to agree less or to disagree with statements describing OTL how to teach these subjects (i.e. learning how to help pupils to make inferences when they read). Finally, within each institution student teachers varied the amount of ‘effort’ they reported (attending lessons, spending more or less hours working or studying), and this in turn influenced their perception of OTL.

Significance
Recent legislation in Chile has increased the requirements that teacher education programs must meet for accreditation. Among other requisites, they are requested to generate and analyze information about the quality of their programs. An instrument as the one developed through this study can be valuable both to deepen our understanding of teacher education in Chile, and also for institutions that wish to monitor their improvement efforts.

Authors

• Lorena Meckes, Universidad Catolica de Chile

• Cristian Cox, The Pontifical Catholic University of Chile

• Pilar Aylwin, Universidad Catolica de Chile

• Constanza Hurtado, Universidad Catolica de Chile

• Renato Orellana, Universidad Catolica de Chile

• Martin Bascope, Universidad Catolica de Chile