Vol 101 Nr 1 (2024)

Teacher shortages are a significant concern in many countries. Hiring pre-service teachers could help to alleviate this problem while providing students an opportunity to develop skills in a real-work context. However, being employed alongside full-time studying might compete with attendance or self-study and, thereby, hinder study progress. This study analyzed the effect of student employment on the study progress of 132 pre-service teachers, using 25 repeated measures over 4 years (n = 3,245). Employment hours, remuneration, domain-relevance, and timing (year of college) were taken into account. Multilevel growth analyses showed that students who spent more time on a paid teaching job in year 3 or 4 obtained significantly more study credits compared to those who were not paid or got paid for a job outside of education. Overall, student employment did not relate to less study progress and depending on domain-relevance, timing and remuneration, the effect can even be positive.

Although knowledge of informational text structures can promote text comprehension, this topic receives little attention in the Dutch primary school curriculum. 201 Dutch students in grades 4-6 participated with their teachers (n = 10) in this quasi-experimental study with a switching-panels replication design. Students either first followed a text structure intervention (TOP) and then went back to business-as-usual, or the other way around. During the intervention, teachers taught their students about the characteristics of four informational text structures, and how to use structure-specific graphic organizers to organize main ideas for each structure. In addition, several writing tasks related to the different text structures were included. At three measurement occasions, students completed text structure tests, reading comprehension tests, summarization tasks, and writing tasks. Only the fourth graders in one iteration of the intervention showed immediate effects over and above the effect of business-as-usual lessons on the text structure test (d = 0.50), the reading comprehension test (d = 0.53), the summarization task (d = 0.48). In both iterations of the intervention, an immediate effect was found on writing (d = 0.33 and d = 0.39). These findings are discussed in the light of test-related issues and implementation fidelity data.

Classroom management learning of student teachers for secondary education at the workplace is often unfocused as they tend to struggle with the effective use of theoretical knowledge and how to use their teacher educators or others during their internship. As a consequence, student teachers lack efficiency in their classroom management learning process. In the present study, we present the development and implementation of an intervention with the ambition to add more focus and direction to student teachers’ classroom management learning by offering them activities they can use in their interpersonal learning process. Participation in this intervention was voluntary for student teachers. The intervention consisted of three activities: lesson observations, planned conversations and unplanned conversations.

The results show that student teachers mainly use a combination of unplanned conversations and lesson observations to promote their learning, and that the intervention is helpful for student teachers to structure their learning process. The main conclusion of this study is that the intervention was effective for student teachers and it had impact on developing their knowledge and beliefs/attitudes, and differences in their interpersonal behaviour. However, the student teachers perceived no differences in their pupils’ behaviour in the classroom.

Dat iemand een boek schrijft over het lerarentekort betekent dat er een serieus probleem bestaat in het onderwijs. Ik vind het interessant te constateren dat de oorzaak van dit probleem door verschillende organisaties gezocht wordt in verschillende omstandigheden. De Rijksoverheid (z.j.) wijt het lerarentekort aan het feit dat onvoldoende leraren instromen, veel oudere leraren vanwege pensionering uitstromen en de arbeidsmarkt krap is. De AOb, de Algemene Onderwijsbond, (2018) wijst op de statusdaling van het beroep, het gebrek aan carrièreperspectieven, de relatief lage salariëring en de hoge werkdruk.

De toekenning van een oorzaak blijkt te leiden tot een richting waarin men oplossingen zoekt. De Rijksoverheid noemt maatregelen om de instroom van leraren te bevorderen, leraren te behouden voor het onderwijs en onderwijs zo te organiseren dat er minder leerkrachten nodig zijn. De AOb vindt dat het beroep aantrekkelijker gemaakt moet worden door het salaris te verhogen en de werkdruk te verlagen. Bulterman komt tot een andere oorzaak en oplossing van het lerarentekort gebaseerd op een verrassende analyse van het probleem.

Op woensdag 15 november 2023 verloor de gemeenschap van onderwijswetenschappers en onderwijsontwerpers een ware reus, Jeroen van Merriënboer. Hij zal heel erg gemist worden!