Teaching quality in literature lessons of student teachers

Findings from a video study

Abstract

High-quality teaching is a pivotal element in achieving favourable student learning outcomes. However, previous research has hardly investigated the quality of literature teaching, especially not among student teachers. This study focuses on addressing this gap by analyzing literature lessons taught by student teachers during their five-month field experience in Germany. For the purpose of this study, high-quality teaching is defined as teaching that successfully integrates normative ideas about good teaching with effective practices that support student learning. Drawing on a newly developed, subject-specific model of teaching quality, this study assesses subject-specific and generic dimensions of teaching quality as well as variation in teaching quality among student teachers. To this end, the study designed new instruments for video-based observation and used them to evaluate N = 22 videotaped literature lessons on narrative texts. The results show that student teachers perform considerably better in generic quality dimensions than in subject-specific ones. Furthermore, standard deviations and cluster analyses indicate considerable student heterogeneity. These findings imply that teacher education programs should emphasize developing subject-specific teaching competencies in literature instruction even more and pay more attention to student teacher heterogeneity.