How Can Teacher Education Fulfill Its More Generous Intentions? Reflections Concerning the Pernicious Effects of Educational Evaluation

Abstract

Teacher education is currently informed by perspectives which aim to improve how it affects teachers' practices and professionalization. Although new ways of educating teachers arise, they still have to coexist with more traditional forms of teacher education, notably, those related to the assessment of learning. This chapter presents an exploratory research study with the objective of identifying teacher educators' and student teachers' perspectives on the Master program in which they were respectively teaching and learning. Focus group discussions were conducted with students and teacher educators involved in a Master program that certifies primary and elementary schools teachers. Our inductive data analysis explores the existence of similarities and differences within and between teacher educators and students perspectives. There is a need to adjust evaluation methods and align them with the objectives of teacher education programs, fostering the articulation between teaching, research, and knowledge transfer. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)