Document Type: Conference Papers
Year published: 1995
Conference: Hong Kong Educational Research Association 12th Annual Conference: Rethinking Education: Reflective Practice, Professionalism and Postmodernization (1995: The Hong Kong Institute of Education)
Teaching practice is regarded as an indispensiable component of teacher education programmes. Supervisors from teacher education institutions contribute to student teachers’ learning in teaching practice by paying lesson observation visits and holding post-observation supervisory meetings with student teachers. The question of what constitutes a good supervisory meeting is of great interest to teacher educators. This paper presents a study which looks into supervisors’ subjective accounts of the best supervisory meeting in teaching practice. The study was conducted with lecturers of a former College of Education in Hong Kong who paid lesson observation visits to student teachers in secondary schools. Seventy-five college supervisors completed a self-report inventory on the perceived best supervisory meeting during a block teaching practice period. These meetings involved observed lessons of fifteen subjects at the junior secondary level. Supervisors reported what happened in the perceived best supervisory meeting in retrospect in the inventory. They gave a quantitative account of the time spent on and the themes of discussion in the meetings. Qualitative data were also collected in the inventory. Supervisors reported the conferencing approaches which they adopted in the perceived best meetings. They quoted examples of questions which they asked to facilitate student teachers’ reflection and expressed their views on the characteristics of good supervisory meetings. The time spent on the best supervisory meetings varied a great deal among different supervisors, with a range of 15 to 120 minutes. The most frequently discussed themes in the meetings were student teacher’s instructional approach to the lesson and student teacher’s mastery of the subject matter while the school environment was the least frequently discussed theme. There was also slight difference between elective subject supervisors’ and general supervisors’ focuses of discussion in the meetings. As far as