Student Teachers Reveal What Really Builds Their Skills During the Practicum

For decades, the teaching practicum has been treated as the moment when theory finally collides with reality, the place where future teachers stop talking about pedagogy and start standing in front of twenty-five restless children. A new qualitative study published in the Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research has now put that assumption under the microscope, asking the people who actually live the practicum experience—student teachers, recent graduates, school mentors, head teachers, inspectors, and even parents—what they believe future teachers genuinely learn, and what keeps them awake at night. The verdict is strikingly consistent: classroom management and the ability to teach a diverse range of learners dominate both their anxieties and their professional growth, while the design of resources and methodologies emerges as the area of strongest, most confident performance.

The research team, led by Jorge-Agustín Zapatero-Ayuso of the Complutense University of Madrid together with colleagues at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, conducted an unusually comprehensive inquiry into how competence develops during the Practicum of Early Childhood and Primary Education degrees in Spain. Rather than surveying students alone, the researchers built a multivoiced dataset from 95 participants: 33 in-depth interviews, 5 focus groups, 22 life stories, and 7 practicum diaries or memoirs. This triangulation of narrative techniques was deliberate. Teacher competence, the authors argue, is not a checklist of isolated skills but a complex, situated construct that only becomes visible through the integrated mobilisation of knowledge, skills, and attitudes in real classrooms, and only surfaces fully when examined through multiple lenses.

Technically, the study followed a qualitative, interpretative case-study design centred on the Practicum programme at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Albacete. That programme is structured in two phases. Practicum I, running from September to December of the third year, places student teachers in classrooms where they observe school organisation, design and implement activities, and evaluate their impact. Practicum II, from January to April of the fourth year, demands far more: planning and delivering an entire didactic unit aligned with the school programme, assessing learning outcomes, and participating in tutoring activities with students and families. In each phase, every trainee is shadowed by both a school mentor and a university supervisor, whose joint observations and evaluations shape the final assessment.

Analysing the transcripts and narratives with ATLAS.ti software, the researchers organised their coding around three core competence areas drawn from prior systematic reviews: classroom management and control, attention to diversity and inclusive practices, and the design and use of teaching resources and methodologies. Multiple analysts independently coded the data, met regularly to resolve discrepancies, and refined category definitions through consensus, an iterative process the authors describe as essential to the trustworthiness of their findings. What emerged was a picture in which the domains that worried trainee teachers most—controlling a class and meeting individual differences—were simultaneously the domains where they reported the most profound professional learning, a paradox that reinforces the practicum’s formative value precisely because it is demanding.

Classroom management emerged as the single most pressing concern. Student teachers described moments of genuine disorientation when confronted with disruptive sixth-graders who would simply ignore them, or with children who talked back while the trainee, lacking any rehearsed strategy, could only stay quiet. Many reported feeling stripped of authority, perceived by pupils as closer to a peer than a teacher. One graduate went as far as advocating for a dedicated subject on classroom management techniques within the degree itself. Yet the strategies that worked were concrete and teachable: grouping pupils by affinity so that cooperative work flowed more smoothly, maintaining constant communication with students, and adapting expectations to the social context of the school, which one graduate described as decisively shaping the educational actions possible in a challenging neighbourhood.

The mentors’ perspective on this domain was unequivocal. School mentors identified classroom control and climate as the principal arena of competence development, and they credited the combination of observation, guided questioning, and day-to-day immersion for most of the progress trainees made. Learning, in this account, happens when a student teacher watches an experienced teacher defuse a conflict, then asks afterward whether a particular response was well or badly handled, and how to improve it next time. This finding elevates the school mentor from a passive assessor to the central pedagogical authority of the practicum experience, echoing a growing body of international literature on mentoring quality as the decisive variable in placement success.

Attention to diversity produced the study’s most uncomfortable findings. While many participants credited the practicum with meaningful learning about individualising instruction—guided by mentors who explained how to work with children with Down syndrome or autism, or by counsellors who prepared complementary activities for a high-ability pupil—a substantial training gap surfaced repeatedly. Graduates confessed that they knew the theoretical catalogue of disorders but not how to actually work with any of them, and students criticised university preparation that taught them to support a child one-to-one without teaching them how to include that child within the ordinary life of the classroom. Negative emotions compounded the problem: trainees described insecurity in meetings with parents, discouragement when facing a fourth-grader who could barely read, and the sheer overwhelm of being one adult responsible for twenty-five children with widely varying needs.

The compensating supports, participants agreed, were relational rather than curricular. Continuous, clear communication from mentors about each pupil’s particularities proved essential, as did the guidance of school counsellors and special education teachers, and structured coordination between teaching staff and families, often maintained through daily communication books. Trainee teachers who were permitted to observe tutorials and family exchanges—even without intervening directly—reported identifying the needs of students with special educational requirements and internalising the professional protocols for responding to them. The authors argue that these findings justify more rigorous selection, preparation, and active involvement of school mentors, particularly in fostering inclusive practices, and they highlight the value of multidisciplinary teams in scaffolding diversity-related learning.

In sharp contrast, the third domain—resources and methodologies—was where trainee teachers shone. Participants reported blending traditional techniques with innovative ones, introducing digital boards, flashcard games, escape rooms, and creative manipulative materials, and preparing backup activities to manage classroom time efficiently. Experienced teachers welcomed this influx, describing the practicum as a genuine exchange in which novices brought fresh methodological knowledge while veterans shared hard-won experience. Notably, trainees showed a new openness to conventional strategies previously dismissed as outdated. Even here, however, mentors and inspectors issued a caution: student-designed lessons often proved too ambitious, and the most successful interventions were those progressively adapted to each mentor’s style and each classroom’s realities. Inspectors described didactic units that took shape gradually, shedding unrealistic elements week by week.

The study’s deeper conclusion is that the practicum works, but works unevenly. It compensates for curricular deficiencies in classroom management and inclusive education, provided mentors guide the process, yet it operates under a predominantly application-focused conception of competence that leaves metacognition, professional responsibility, and reflective-critical awareness underdeveloped. University supervisors, remarkably, barely registered as significant figures in participants’ accounts of competence development—an absence the authors flag as both a limitation and a research priority. Their recommendations are concrete: dedicated courses, seminars, and workshops targeting classroom management and diversity, stronger university–school collaboration, and deliberate cultivation of reflection. The ultimate stake, the authors stress, is not the trainees’ report cards but the wellbeing and optimal development of the children those trainees will one day teach.

Subject of Research: Competence development of pre-service early childhood and primary education teachers during the teaching practicum

Article Title: Competence development of pre-service teachers during Practicum: a qualitative study from the perspective of its protagonists

Article References: Zapatero-Ayuso, J.-A., Díaz-Carretero, A., Gil-García, M.-I., & Gil-Madrona, P. (2026). Competence development of pre-service teachers during Practicum: a qualitative study from the perspective of its protagonists. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 15(1), Article 11. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-026-00057-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-026-00057-0

Keywords: teaching practicum, pre-service teachers, classroom management, inclusive education, teacher training, school mentoring, competence development, qualitative research, early childhood education, primary education, university-school collaboration, teacher professional development