Page 133 - Empowering pre-service teachers through inquiry - Lidewij van Katwijk

problem was that teacher educators had difficulties in supervising pre-service teacher inquiry. During this time, most teacher educators had no experience in conducting or supervising research activities and were recruited because of their teaching qualities (Geerdink et al., 2015). Why pre-service teacher inquiry had become compulsory and if this led to better teachers were not clear.
Pre-service teacher research or inquiry
The distinction between research and inquiry (Reid, 2004), as described in the
introduction, was quite relevant for primary teacher education in the professional
bachelor’s degree programmes. The aim of Dutch primary teacher education
programmes is to educate pre-service teachers to become practitioners who use
intentional and systematic methods as a learning strategy to inquire into their own
practice (Borko et al., 2007; Cochran-Smith et al., 2009). The aim is not to educate
them to become researchers. Pre-service teachers should ideally be driven by
curiosity and knowledge about an educational problem in a particular context to 6 improve their own educational practice (Jacobs et al., 2015). The use of a variety of
quantitative and qualitative research methods and scientific, international literature, as well as a contribution to the knowledge base of educational research, elements of academic research, is not a requirement. Therefore, the professional bachelor’s degree programme for primary teacher education should focus on pre-service teacher inquiry, not on research. We insist to use the Dutch term praktijkonderzoek as the formal definition for inquiry in documents concerned.
Developing an inquiry stance
As mentioned previously, the aim of pre-service teacher research or inquiry in teacher education is to educate teachers with an inquiry stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) to become curious and critical teachers whose work is inquiry based (Baan, Gaikhorst & Volman, 2018; Toom et al., 2010; Uiterwijk-Luijk et al., 2019). Pre-service teacher inquiry represents a professional learning strategy intended to improve the teaching practice by focusing on student learning and systematic adaptations of teaching to students’ needs using scientific knowledge (Dana & Yendol-Hoppey, 2014; Dobber et al., 2012). Introducing the development of an inquiry stance in a teacher education programme is much more complicated than teaching and assessing an inquiry as project, which treats inquiry as a time-bound activity (Cochran-Smith et al., 2009). By requiring a research report, as capstone, the teacher education programme ensures that pre-service teachers view pre-service teacher inquiry as a project. Therefore,
General conclusion and discussion
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