Abstract:
Teacher quality is a continuing interest to most teacher education reform discourses in many countries. Armour and Booth (1999), Feiman-Nemser (2001) and Hoban (2005) argue that most teacher education graduates in many countries often feel inadequate in their preparation for classroom teaching. In Kenya, the Sessional paper No. 1 of 2005, the Kenya Education Sector Support Programme document of 2005-2010 and Wanzare (2002) cite low quality primary teacher education as a major impediment to education reforms. This is attributed to the traditional content-based pedagogical primary teacher education model that lacks adequate learner involvement, presents a fragmented view of learning and has little connection between theory and practice. This study sought to establish whether context-based learning through focus group discussions on teaching and classroom practice improves teachers’ teaching effectiveness and aimed at developing a suitable pre-service primary teacher education model for Kenya. A Quasi-Experimental research design in form of a pre-test/post-test longitudinal panel control group was used. It involved a stratified random sample of 80 first year pre-service teachers from Meru and Egoji colleges (40 for experimental and 40 for control groups). The experimental group was sub-divided into groups of ten of equal gender proportions that held discussions under the facilitation of the researcher once per week during teaching practice sessions. A classroom observation schedule, a focus group discussion schedule and a reflective diary were used to collect data. The findings obtained through the use of a t-test for independent means revealed that there were significant differences between the two groups on instructional systems planning, teacher-student interactions, students’ motivation and use of instructional resources except on teachers’ classroom management.
