Issues in competence and pre-service teacher education. Part 2. The assessment of teaching practice

Abstract

One of the challenges facing teacher educators is to develop assessment practices that will minimise the uncertainty and subjectivity associated with assessing teacher competence, and that will allow them to distinguish clearly between those who are competent and those who are not (yet) competent. According to the Norms and Standards for Educators (Department of Education 2000), teaching practice should form an integral part of teacher education programmes and should be regarded as a way in which to assess all the different roles of educators as part of the integrated and applied assessment task. This is a major challenge since the assessor must consider several modalities such as the selection of suitable measuring instruments, the question of which competences should be assessed, the advantages and disadvantages of the direct observation of teaching performance and the relevant levels of performance. This article explores only some of the many issues related to teaching practice and the assessment thereof.