Empowering student teachers for practicum: lecturer and student opinions

Practicum is generally regarded a key component in teacher education. If properly done, Teaching Practice (T.P.) is there to develop student teacher-teaching skills so that they begin collecting experiences to enrich their professional growth. While doing T.P student teachers need to survive in the classroom, they need to display baseline teaching skills. For this to be possible student teachers require proper and adequate empowerment before they go for T.P. While doing T.P some students at Zimbabwe Open University did not do well in their assessment or did not perform impressively. A case study was conducted to determine lecturer and student opinions on the adequacy of the strategies that are used to empower student teachers for T.P at the Zimbabwe Open Universityin the Midlands region. Participants were sampled purposively and conveniently. An open ended questionnaire was self-administered to full time lecturers and students teachers who had gone through T.P. or were doing T.P. at the time the study was conducted. A focus group discussion was held with part time tutors in the faculty of education. Generated data were analysed across respondents and questions guiding the study. The study established that some appropriate strategies were in place to empower students for T.P. Among these were provision of T.P related modules; tutorials and T.P preparation sessions. However in trying to empower students before going for practicum, the main challenge opined was non-attendance by some students for tutorial and T.P prep sessions. The strategies were also found not to be comprehensive especially in the area of ICT as the department did not train student teachers to use ICT in their teaching while doing T.P. Among other things, the study recommended student teacher attendance for T.P. prep sessions and widening of the ICT curriculum