Transforming Campus into Practice: Collective Peer Teaching in Norwegian Teacher Education

Abstract

This article reports on student perceptions of a peer-teaching experiment in three courses in Norwegian teacher education. The course design resulted from a desire to increase the level of student activity and provide students with teaching practice during on-campus sessions, partially as a result of the current debate about “too much academization” and “not enough practice” in Norwegian teacher education. Survey data were collected from a total of 51 student respondents, who had all been peer teachers, students exposed to their peers’ teaching, and observers of their peers’ teaching. The survey questions explored their perceptions of the usefulness and learning outcome of this approach. The degree of satisfaction with the design varied between the groups, but in general the responses from the majority of students ranged from neutral to very positive. Group sizes and the contents of the individual courses may have influenced student perceptions, as may the degree of scaffolding, but in general the experiment may be judged a cautious success and an approach that may fruitfully be developed further.