Views of Prospective Teachers and Supervisors on a Practicum Program: A Case Study

Practicing what has been learned throughout the teacher education programs in Turkey is accepted as the end point of the preservice teaching career. This period of practice teaching serves as the time to implement theory into practice under the supervision of faculty members. In this study, the major purpose was to investigate the views of supervisors and preservice teachers regarding the practice teaching program which was redesigned by the department academics to overcome some limitations of the current one. As a second purpose, the commonalities and differences between the self-reflections of preservice teachers and feedback provided by the supervisors on a specific practice teaching session in the final term were also investigated. To gather data, six preservice teachers majoring in language teaching and two faculty members as supervisors were assigned to respond to two different written guidelines provided with these purposes. Written responses were analyzed through content analysis and open-coding. Results showed that both preservice teachers and supervisors think that redesigned program has many strengths such as time allocated to practice and feedback sessions. However, they also believe that, active practice teaching only in the final year is the weakness of this new program. The analysis of the written documents after the practice teaching of prospective teachers showed that prospective teachers gained a great reflective perspective throughout their education. And with this ability, they reflected on many common issues regarding their strengths and weaknesses with their supervisors. There are also some differences in their reflections and feedback from supervisors about the use of materials, planning and use of methods. This study has specific implications for language teacher education programs and teacher trainers.