Understanding Student-Teachers’ Performances within an Inquiry-Based Practicum

The role of an inquiry-based practicum in the education of future teachers has been identified as a key component to foster student-teachers’ abilities to face problems, try to solve them, work on doubts and produce situated and valuable learning from their own practices (Cochran-Smith & Little, 2001; Beck, 2001). The interaction between mentors and student-teachers involved in this process requires feeding the mutual understanding to collaboratelly make decisions to work on difficulties. In this reflective study, the practicum was the perfect scenario to evaluate how student-teachers and mentors engaged in inquiry-based work to face problems on a daily basis in schools in the context of teachers education. This article shows how a group of 12 students-teachers and their mentors experienced difficulties within an inquiry-based practicum in an undergraduate program while conducting an instructional intervention, designing, implementing and applying a project relevant to their teaching context. Given the qualitative nature of this study, some stages of the process were analysed over a period of a year bringing as a result relevant insights to enhance their teaching practicum-process in Colombian public schools.