Collaborative Learning Practices in Teacher Education

Abstract

This study entitled “Collaborative Learning Practices in Teacher Education” aimed to explore practices, effectiveness and challenges of collaborative learning (CL) in teacher education (TE) through ELT Seminar and Report Witting Course. This is an ethnography research. The ten studentteachers and two teacher-educators were selected purposively from Tribhuvan

University, Kathmandu district of Nepal. This study used in-depth interview,

FGD and observation diary record as a tool for data collection and some related

documents were reviewed for secondary data. In order to obtain required data, two teacher educators were interviewed and FGD was conducted with ten student-teachers and I observed and recorded the behaviors, practices,

activities, reactions, feelings, experiences, attitude and understanding of the target community with a diary record by assimilating myself in the culture of

target. After data collection, the data were coded thematically and analyzed

descriptively. The finding of this study was that the collaborative learning

practices (collaborative research, presentation, critical feedback, workshops,

seminars and conferences) in teacher education through ELT Seminar course developed the desired personal, social and spirit of professionalism in teachers.

This thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter contains background of the study, statement of the problem, objective, research questions, significance, delimitations of the study, and operational definitions of the key terms. The second chapter deals with the review of related theoretical and empirical literature on practices, effectiveness and challenges of collaborative learning in TE. Chapter three consists research design, population, tools, sampling procedures, sources of data, data collection and analysis procedures and ethical considerations. Forth chapter incorporates the analysis and interpretations of the data where fifth chapter includes findings, conclusions and recommendations and further research. References and appendixes are included at the end of this thesis.