The Future of Education

Teacher collaboration is together with (self-)reflection a key factor to improve teacher professionalism. Also, it’s being said to improve the school quality and teacher’s health. Nonetheless collaboration is not being performed sufficiently. One approach to change this is to implement cooperational behaviours early, in the university-based teacher-training. To develop eligible methods, the status quo must be defined first. Therefore, I research how, with whom and why education students and teachers-in-training collaborate. The study is based on a mixed methods design: At first qualitative interviews were held to define the structures of collaboration. Main results were, that especially students in internships don’t collaborate at all with fellow students but only with teachers. Also collaboration is spontaneously and we only scarcely find planned cooperation structures between teachers and trainees. All in all, the main collaboration form is exchange (of materials and information) and higher forms of collaboration are hardly realized. To gain more profound numbers, the results were transformed into a standardizes questionnaire. In this second, quantitative study, 1600 education students and teachers-in-training participated. The statistic results are the base for a third study. This one will be qualitative again in form of episodic interviews. The aim is to explain the quantitative results and point out structures, where universities and schools can start to act and improve the teacher collaboration at an early point of their career to improve teacher professionalization through teacher education. At the conference, the results of the first two studies will be presented as well as the leading questions for the interviews that will take place in July and August.

Keywords: Collaboration, professionalism, teacher education, mixed methods;