Trepartssamtalets återkopplingspraktik

The purpose of this study is to understand how feedback is constructed during practicum placements in preschool and primary school student teacher education, with a particular focus on post-observation conferences—a dialogue between the student teachers, school-based teacher supervisors and university supervisors. The research questions are focused on the content dimensions and their directions of the feedback during the conferences, and how these can be understood in relation to the conferences as communicative activities. Eighteen post-observation conferences were analyzed using qualitative content analysis, guided by Hattie and Timperley’s feedback model. Additionally, the study draws on Darling-Hammond’s conceptions of teacher and teaching quality, and Linell’s theory of communicative activity types. The findings show four categories of feedback: (1) general feedback summarizing the student teacher’s performance, (2) specific feedback about the student teacher’s personal dispositions such as personality, (3) the student teacher’s professional dispositions such as responsibility, and (4) feedback on pedagogical competence, particularly the ability to implement specific teaching designs. Feedback is directed at the person, the assignment, the role and the task levels. However, the feedback often appears to lack dept in supporting student teachers’ reflection on their own learning and on children’s learning. Moreover, the conferences encompassed multiple overlapping communicative activities, suggesting that feedback served several concurrent functions within these post-observation conference dialogues.