Clinical praxis exams: linking academic study with professional practice knowledge

One of the more salient challenges facing teacher educators and curriculum leaders in schools is how to assist beginning teachers to link their academic studies with professional practice knowledge. Traditionally, the role of universities and colleges in teacher education has been to provide both theoretical and practical understandings of curriculum and pedagogy, as well as to administer the placement and mentoring of pre-service teachers in schools; however, whilst the remit may have been to provide both theoretical and practical understandings, the overall emphasis was largely on the provision of theoretical and decontextualised, laboratory-based perspectives (Darling-Hammond and Bransford 2005). This emphasis was balanced by a belief that teaching of much of the requisite professional practice knowledge would be taken up by teachers in schools. From a university perspective, practice was generally seen as the ‘poor cousin’ of theory and the emphasis on extant practice by classroom teachers was frequently cited as a key explanation for why the lofty ideas put forth in the academy did not work in schools.