Bridging Campus Courses and Field Experiences in University-based Teacher Education Program Using Online Diaries

Abstract

New teachers who are shocked by real-world classroom situations - such as rules of the local school, human relationships in a shielded environment, and the reality of teaching children - tend to leave the workforce within a few years, and it has become necessary to educate student teachers in the universities with a focus on adaptive professional socialization of teachers (Zeichner & Gore 1990) to overcome this problem. We have provided a weblog community where pre-service teachers can have a dialogue based on their report of experiences during their practice teaching. However, in order to promote the professional socialization of teachers, we have designed a new weblog community where experienced teachers can participate. Through comparative analysis, we have pursued the effectiveness of this change in design. In this study, we referred to Hong (2010) and categorized their diaries and comments within the weblog community into nine factors, and analyzed the features of their communication. We revised the design of the pre-teaching from the year 2010, and altered the lesson design of the pre-teaching for the year 2012 so that pre-service teachers could exchange their opinions focusing more on the ways of schools and teachers. The class design was changed so that experienced teachers provided hints during pre-teaching to motivate pre-service teachers to think about the issues, and the pre-service teachers were made to take the in itiative in using the weblog. From the results, we found that the number of entries of diaries and comments into the weblog community differed between the years 2010 and 2012. Moreover, it became relevant that the ratio of the diary entries about “commitment towards work,” “value and standpoint as teachers” and the like increased.