Abstract:

As in other parts of the world, teaching practice exercise is one of the key requirements for qualification as a professional teacher in Nigeria. The exercise currently lasts for six months (in one stretch) in colleges of education while in some universities. It is carried out in the third and final years of the degree programme, each leg lasting for about two months. This paper examined the level of synergy between the teacher education institutions in Lagos State, Nigeria, and the cooperating secondary schools before, during and after the teaching practice exercise and how this impacted on the quality and effectiveness of the exercise. Questionnaires were administered on five hundred trainee teachers from five government-owned teacher education institutions in the state (two universities and three colleges of education), fifty cooperating teachers and twenty school principals from twenty schools in the local government areas where each of the institutions is located in order to gauge the quality of mentoring and support that the trainees received on the one hand, and the level of synergy with the training institutions on the other, during the 2012/2013 Teaching Practice exercise. The study revealed a huge communication gap and limited cooperation between the teacher training institutions and the cooperating schools/teachers. The attendant results of these include poor selection of cooperating teachers, near absence of mentoring for trainee teachers, lack of correspondence between the cooperating teachers and the training institutions and non-inclusion of cooperating schools’/teachers’ inputs in the computation of the grading of the exercise. The paper recommends ways to achieve a stronger synergy between teacher training institutions for better conduct of teaching practice exercise and the realization of its objectives.

Keywords:

Teaching practice, teacher training, mentoring, teacher education.