Cloud Teacher Education’ Reading Club: the ideal combination of discussion articles and social talk
During the conference in Nijmegen, we had an interesting cloud session with some enthusiast participants, in which we discussed the main issues we see in teacher education in Europe.
We also came up with the idea of starting a ‘reading club’, in order to have more contact with each other during the year. In this reading club the idea is that we all read an article before the meeting, and to have a discussion about the main elements of the article. Depending of the interest of the reading club participants, we could specify on the theoretical framework which was presented in the article, the methodology or the results. Moreover, the idea was also to talk about the relevance it could have for our practice, both as teacher educators and as researchers.
During the first session of the reading club, which was held on May 25th, we discussed the work of Antoine Lecat, Isabel Raemdonck, Simon Beausart and Virginie Marz: The what and why of primary and secondary school teachers’ informal learning activities
We all agreed, this is an inspiring article, discussing informal activities student teachers undertake at the workplace having valuable impact for their learning. We talked about the core elements of the article, and soon discovered we projected it differently towards our practices, as this differed. However, the conversations turned to the differences, and also similarities, in our contexts – and that is so valuable to have that conversation, just on the edge of a regular Thurday afternoon.
Bottom line is that this method of a ‘reading club’ is a very easy and accessible way of digging more into recent studies, comparing and learning from all our practices and getting to know each other better. One of the participants said this was an ideal ‘in-between’ activity between the conferences. And of course, we also had enough time for social talk and looked forward to plan the next reading club session in October. Please let us know if you want to join the next session!