Abstract:

Teaching Practice is a course that pre-service teachers apply what they have been taught during their undergraduate education to their professional lives. This course has three key elements that are pre-service teacher, the cooperating teacher and the university professor. This research is centered in the cooperating teachers and focused on their opinions about both pre-service teachers and the teaching practice process. Thus, the aim of the research is to determine the opinions of cooperative teachers about teacher competencies of pre-service social studies teachers. 13 social studies teachers who have worked in Trabzon (4 of them have worked in the city centre and 5 of them have worked in Akçaabat town) were selected with purposive sampling. In this qualitative research, data were collected through a semi structured interview form. The form was prepared in accordance with the Teaching Practice Assessment Form which was published by The Council of Higher Education. In conclusion, following titles were determined: pre-service teachers had adequate knowledge and skills especially in usage of teaching technologies and the materials, and the preparation of activities on evaluation and assessment, but they had incompetence in teaching methods and techniques, content knowledge, classroom management and communication skills. Cooperative teachers showed student teachers’ inexperience, reluctance and time limitation in cooperating school as the reasons of these incompetencies. Keywords: Social studies, teaching practice, pre-service teacher, cooperating teacher’s opinions

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