Teaching practice: Experiences of pre-service physics teachers

Abstract

The experience pre-service teachers take to the teaching profession go a long way to determine their success level. This experience is usually learnt consciously or unconsciously, developed, and improved during their professional teacher training program. This paper adopts the concurrent mixed methods research approach to investigate the experiences of pre-service physics teachers after completing 2019/2020 teaching practice exercise. The investigation involved 84 final year college of education students in Nigeria. A semi structured questionnaire, which allows the collection of quantitative and qualitative strands of data simultaneously was used. Dewey’s (1963) theory of experience was adopted to unpack the experiences of pre-service teachers. Findings from this study revealed that secondary schools have qualified physics teachers who have good mastery of the subject matter. This study concludes that experience pre-service teachers have during teaching practice exercise has capacity to determine how far they would go in profession.