Abstract:

Professional master’s degree programs differ from standard master’s programs fundamentally due to they are standalone and do not intend to feed a Ph.D. program. Besides, one of the main characteristics of professional master´s degrees is that they require internships or practicum, where each student works with an external mentor, who is not a faculty member, but a professional related to the subject.

This fact claims for a necessary coordination between the university advisor and the professional mentor to acquire de corresponding professional skills, but also to demonstrate academically this acquisition in the defence of a master thesis.

The authors of this work are two (faculty) advisors of students of a professional master’s degree in Education with emphasis in Mathematics Education and their professional mentor, who is a teacher in a secondary school. While sharing this responsibility, we thought that some activities could be done and some resources could be used to help the students to gain not only excellent teaching skills and a modern approach to pedagogy, but also to developing several skills required in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) for any of their master’s degrees.

In this work we show our teaching experience, analyzing in detail the context of our professional master’ degree program, the objectives, methodology and evaluation and the main difficulties in the whole coordinated process. We also provide several conclusions regarding possible improvements of this experience and its extrapolation to other professional master’s degree programs.

Keywords:

Professional Master’s Degree, Practicum, Master Thesis, University-Education collaboration.