Research-based teacher education can be understood in different ways: as a call to understand teacher education institutions as research institutions, as the ambition to educate student teachers to have an inquiring attitude, as the basing of teacher education curricula on the latest research, or as a combination of all three.In this chapter we reflect on a method of connecting research, curriculum development and practice in teacher education, presenting a case study of a conversational community of teacher educators and researchers. The aim of the conversational community was to understand the process of curriculum design in teacher education as an inspiring and practical combination of design research, self-study, collaborative action research and curriculum study by teacher educators. This process was supported by a conversational framework in which curriculum development was understood as an ongoing dialogue between vision, intentions, design and practice in the teacher education curriculum. Using the conversational framework in this single case study of a conversational community, we have tried to connect teacher education research, curriculum development and practice in a meaningful way.
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Teacher beliefs have been shown to play a major role in shaping educational practice, especially in the area of grammar teaching―an area of language education that teachers have particularly strong views on. Traditional grammar education is regularly criticized for its focus on rules-of-thumb rather than on insights from modern linguistics, and for its focus on lower order thinking. A growing body of literature on grammar teaching promotes the opposite, arguing for more linguistic conceptual knowledge and reflective or higher order thinking in grammar pedagogy. In the Netherlands, this discussion plays an important role in the national development of a new curriculum. This study explores current Dutch teachers’ beliefs on the use of modern linguistic concepts and reflective judgment in grammar teaching. To this end, we conducted a questionnaire among 110 Dutch language teachers from secondary education and analyzed contemporary school textbooks likely to reflect existing teachers’ beliefs. Results indicate that teachers generally appear to favor stimulating reflective judgement in grammar teaching, although implementing activities aimed at fostering reflective thinking seems to be difficult for two reasons: (1) existing textbooks fail to implement sufficient concepts from modern linguistics, nor do they stimulate reflective thinking; (2) teachers lack sufficient conceptual knowledge from linguistics necessary to adequately address reflective thinking.
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The aim of this dissertation was to investigate conditions that may affect students’ reflective learning specifically in small groups and professional practice. Conclusion.Small groups are beneficial for reflective learning for which teachers need specific competencies. Teachers need to be trained in facilitating students’ reflective learning. To further develop the reflective competence of students during clinical practice it is important to discuss unprofessional situations in small groups. Students should learn to check the validity of excuses for not responding. Clinical supervisors play an important role in this process.Dissertation for the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, with references and summary in Dutch. The study presented in this thesis was carried out at the Graduate School for Health Research (SHARE) of the University of Groningen, within the program of Research in medical Education (RME) and at the Research and Innovation Group in Health Care and Nursing of the Hanze University of Applied Sciences Groningen, the Netherlands
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