Since collaboration within schools gains importance and is considered significant for teachers’ professional development in order to meet the new 21st-century educational demands, teacher education institutes show a growing interest in field experiences inspired by collaborative learning, such as team teaching. Team teaching is a teaching model in which (student) teachers work collaboratively in the preparation, teaching and evaluation of a course. In order to assess team teaching practices in teacher education by monitoring perceptions of collaborative team teaching experiences, an instrument is needed that offers insights to guide the learning process and support well-founded decision making. Therefore, an easy-to-use quantitative questionnaire to explore student teachers’ team teaching perceptions was developed and validated in four stages: an extensive literature review (1) resulting in a preliminary questionnaire containing advantages and disadvantages of team teaching (2). Next, a pilot study was conducted with 14 student teachers (3), followed by a further validation and reliability study based on exploratory factor analysis, peer debriefing, confirmatory factor analysis and internal consistency analysis with 181 participating student teachers (4). The final questionnaire comprises 29 Likert-items in four scales – collaboration, co-creation, coaching and complexity – and appears to be both valid and reliable.
Part of the book: Teacher Education