Abstracts - Earli

education agencies can amplify and align the connections between effective teacher education,supervised field experiences, and post-graduate classroom teaching. The paper describeschallenges and successes in the development of partnerships between schools and the teachereducation program at the University of Groningen.Teaching competencies during pre-service training: What we know about their constructionColette Gervais , University of Montreal, CanadaEnrique Correa Molina , University of Sherbrooke, CanadaMichel Lepage , University of Montreal, CanadaA better understanding of the construction of teaching competencies during the training of futureteachers would help to promote their learning potential. We identify progressive demonstration ofcompetencies and resources mobilized in action and describe the process at work in theirconstruction. A better understanding of this process will allow educators to intervene in a moreeffective way to help the trainees in their apprenticeship. Data was collected from: 22 studentteachers during secondary school internships (2nd, 3rd and 4th years of training) via videorecordings of class situations and explicitation sessions of their practice, 15 cooperating teachersand 6 university supervisors. The approach used is based on the practical argument(Fenstermacher, 1994) that is aimed at encouraging teachers to verbalize their practice. Weanalyzed the transcripts of all sessions and validated the interpretations between co-researchers.Persisting changes appeared in the manifestation of competencies. The organizing principle of thisconstruction is confrontation of the reality of teaching practice, which suggests a reflexive processthat regulates experience and performance.The teacher quality partnership research enterprise: Enabling systemic understanding andimprovementRobert J. Yinger, University of Cincinnati, USADaniel Kelly, University of Cincinnati, USAOver the past decade, research has documented the importance of teacher quality for schooleffectiveness and student achievement. The Teacher Quality Partnership was created to address thecritical need for large-scale and longitudinal research that examines the characteristics andpractices of effective teachers and to identify the patterns and empirical linkages of teacherpreparation and professional learning that promote student achievement as measured by academicgrowth. This presentation will describe the research enterprise designed by the Teacher QualityPartnership, a research and policy consortium involving all 50 teacher preparation institutions andkey education agencies in the State of Ohio, USA.– 312 –