Abstract:

Teaching is widely perceived as a difficult job, especially by teachers in their first five years into the job. Almost every new teacher encounters what is commonly recognised as a first-year shock, where they feel their preparation at initial teacher education (ITE) is quite different than the real requirements of the job. One good explanation for the first-year shock is the on-going theory-practice gap. Meaning, the disparity between what these teachers learn and experience at ITE on one side and the actual teaching practice in schools on the other side. Although many actions and reactions are proposed or already have been implemented over the past decades to tackle this problem, it is still impacting the performance of new teachers, and thus regarded as one of the biggest challenges for teacher education today. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of the main underlying causes to the theory-practice gap and promote the use of teacher competence frameworks as a potential means to solve this pervasive problem.