Triad Post-Lesson Conferences: A Balanced Conversation?

In French-speaking Belgium, pre-service teachers are required to develop 13 competences during their teacher preparation. However, little research has investigated the way in which supervisors and cooperating teachers support pre-service teachers in their proficiency in teaching competences during debriefings. Faced with this gap, this article presents a model of the effective practices of the triad (pre-service teacher, cooperating teachers, supervisor) during post-lesson conferences. To this end, a grid enabling the researcher to classify the triad's comments by theme was developed and inserted into a software program. Firstly, the results indicate that the debriefings analyzed were not discussions in which speaking time was distributed equitably. Secondly, the analysis reveals that the most frequently discussed themes were learning management, administrative record-keeping and classroom management. Thirdly, a sequencing of the debriefing into several phases was achieved through analysis of the visual representation obtained following coding of the themes evoked by the triad. Taken together, the results offer a number of avenues for improving initial teacher preparation.