The practicum in initial teacher training at the University of Cologne (Germany)

Abstract

In 2015, universities in the state of Northrhine-Westfalia introduced the semester practicum which was appreciably longer than previous teaching practica. Inspired by a paper by Zabalza Beraza (2016) who suggested that external training practices may be viewed (a) as a curricular component, (b) as a learning situation and (c) as a personal experience, I decided to analyse the semester practicum in teacher education at my university, the University of Cologne, as well as the results of a research project carried out by researcher from the universities of Cologne, Paderborn and Siegen from the point of view of Zabalza Beraza’s framework. The framework turned out to be very helpful in organizing findings from official documents and from the research project. At the same time, it seemed that Zabalza Beraza and the initiators of the semester practicum differ slightly with respect to the how they perceive the objectives of the practicum in teacher education.