Inducing supervision practices among peers in a community of practice.

Abstract

The Bologna process and the creation of the European Higher Education Area have beenproving to be a challenge. As teachers trainers in a Higher Education institution, the teacher training models deserve, to us, particular reflection, namely the teaching processes adopted by Higher Education teachers. We believe that teacher training is an important period in the individuals socialization, in which the inherent criticality of the professional knowledge construction process (in the sense of Shulman (1986) – including content, pedagogical and curricular knowledge) should be a central tenet in the construction of teachers professionnality. Presenting itself as an organization capable of conceiving, designing, acting and thinking, we claim for supervision pratices that help school to discuss and plan for the future, truly ambitious, that questions the less well achieved moments to understand their causes, being able to draw new action lines.Thus, having the establishment of a Community of Practice as a starting point, it is our goal with this text to present some of the support tools that are being tested in pedagogical supervision among peers with some preliminary results. We believe these results point towards what it is essential to develop and present the induction of a new pedagogical supervision for Higher Education. By identifying facilitators/constraining mechanisms on the implementation of regulatory processes of educational activity among peers, we aim not only improving the quality of the practices on Higher Education contexts, but also benefiting, from our point of view, the learning process of students in general.

The Bologna process and the creation of the European Higher Education Area have been proving to be a challenge. As teachers trainers in a Higher Education institution, the teacher training models deserve, to us, particular reflection, namely the teaching processes adopted by Higher Education teachers. We believe that teacher training is an important period in the individuals socialization, in which the inherent criticality of the professional knowledge construction process (in the sense of Shulman (1986) – including content, pedagogical and curricular knowledge) should be a central tenet in the construction of teachers professionnality. Presenting itself as an organization capable of conceiving, designing, acting and thinking, we claim for supervision pratices that help school to discuss and plan for the future, truly ambitious, that questions the less well achieved moments to understand their causes, being able to draw new action lines.Thus, having the establishment of a Community of Practice as a starting point, it is our goal with this text to present some of the support tools that are being tested in pedagogical supervision among peers with some preliminary results. We believe these results point towards what it is essential to develop and present the induction of a new pedagogical supervision for Higher Education. By identifying facilitators/constraining mechanisms on the implementation of regulatory processes of educational activity among peers, we aim not only improving the quality of the practices on Higher Education contexts, but also benefiting, from our point of view, the learning process of students in general.