"What concerns pre-service teachers the most?" A quantitative research for concurrent and consecutive teacher training models

Abstract

In the Republic of Turkey, as in many other countries, there are primarily two types of teacher preparation. One is the concurrent model, where a student spends four to five years at university in an Education faculty, learning to become a school teacher.  The second is the consecutive model, where university seniors and/or graduates of the Arts & Sciences faculty attend a one-year pedagogical formation certification programme to become qualified as a teacher. Only authorized Education faculties are eligible to provide these types of pedagogical formation education. Students attending an Education faculty through the concurrent model, take several pedagogical and practicum courses over a four-year period, while the students in the consecutive model only take a portion of the pedagogical courses and then complete a teaching practicum during the second semester of the year-long programme. This current study is based on the idea that along with professional competencies, psychological readiness for teaching is also affected by teacher education and training. Thus, in this study, the pre-service teachers’ concerns about teaching were analyzed as well as whether their concerns differed according to programme type, gender, and/or field of study. Data from a Teacher Concerns Checklist  (TCC) completed by 545 pre-service teachers was analysed through descriptive statistics as well as multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and one-way analysis of variance (one-way ANOVA). It was revealed in the analysis results that students from the concurrent model of teacher education were most concerned about the lack of public support for schools, insufficient clerical help for teachers, and the large number of administrative interruptions. While, the students from the consecutive teacher education model were most concerned about having too many students in class, lack of public support for schools, and too many standards and regulations for teachers to follow. Overall, the students from the concurrent model had significantly fewer concerns about teaching than students from the consecutive model. The field of study did have a significant effect on the concerns of preservice teachers; whereas, gender had no effect.