Conditions for Success of Cross-Phase Collaboration in Teacher Education for the Development of Digitalisation-Related Resources in Communities of Practice

Abstract

In the course of the digital transformation of society, teacher education is faced with the challenge of imparting competences to (prospective) teachers in order to design school teaching and learning processes in a contemporary way. One possibility lies in the development of theoretically sound and practice-oriented digitalisation-related resources that can be used for these purposes. In order to develop such resources, the approach of cross-phase cooperation in communities of practice (CoPs) of teacher education seems promising, since the expertise of all phases can be used here. Previous research results on the conditions for success of collaboration suggest factors such as goal orientation, task accomplishment, cohesion or assumption of responsibility, but mainly refer to teams in general or CoPs from the business context. Thus, conditions for the success of cross-phase cooperation in teacher education have not yet been researched, which is why this article examines this topic. To address this research desideratum, quantitative and qualitative data from the COMeIN project (Communities of Practice für eine innovative Lehrkräftebildung in NRW) are used. By means of a multiple regression analysis, task accomplishment in the CoPs was identified as a central predictor for positively perceived cross-phase collaboration. The qualitative content analysis also clarifies, among other things, the high relevance of taking into account the different system logics of the teacher training phases. The results can contribute to improving the cooperation of the teacher education phases in CoPs in order to adequately shape social transformations in teacher education.