Doing self-study research on initial teacher training: The importance of hearing future teachers

Abstract

The two self-studies of teacher education practices reported in this article were conducted collaboratively in two different countries —Portugal and Canada. The focus is on the value of listening to student teachers and how the authors interpreted and responded to what they heard. Overall, listening and responding yielded positive responses from the student teachers. This article illustrates several ways of listening to students and the positive effects of listening on both the student teachers and the teacher educators. The pedagogy of teacher education is a major concern for those learning to teach: How they are taught matters, for they are always thinking about how they themselves will teach. The authors believe strongly in the importance of making a teacher educators’ pedagogy transparent by explaining our rationales and by explaining how and why we are making changes in response to their comments. This article provides background about the research genre of self-study of teacher education practices, illustrates self-study with data from the student teachers in the authors’ classes, and summarizes what the authors learned in terms of changing assumptions and new pedagogical practices.