Several countries have experienced both a dearth and a reduction in quality of applicants to teacher-training courses. In addition, there is a significant leakage from teacher-training programmes. More knowledge about these factors may mean that it will be possible to initiate appropriate measures that will improve the teacher-training programmes. Research indicates that affective commitment to a profession is an important factor in promoting good professional practice. The purpose of the present study is to explore antecedents of occupational or affective commitment, and of intent to leave the profession in the future, amongst teacher students.By affective commitment we mean an emotional attachment to the teaching profession, for instance that an individual has positive feelings about the thought of becoming a teacher one day; that an individual is looking forward to beginning in the teaching profession. In particular, we investigate connections between the attitudes of student teachers and their experiences from the on-campus part of their teacher-training programme and their experiences from teaching practice in schools. Structural equation modeling is used. The empirical analysis indicates that practice supervisors and their integration of theory and practice in the school-based section of teacher training are the most important elements in explaining both affective commitment amongst students to their future profession as teachers, as well as their intent to leave the teaching profession. In other words, there are stronger associations between affective commitment and experiences gained during teaching practice in schools than is the case in relation to the theoretical campus based element of the training. Schools hosting teaching practice, however, face a great challenge in contributing to a coupling between theory and practice.

The empirical survey has shown moderately-strong positive associations between student teachers’ perception of feedback from practice supervisors and the student teachers’ communication with practice supervisors concerning their own experiences on the one hand and their affective commitment to the teaching profession on the other. This indicates the importance of the qualitative aspects of the school’s organisation of teaching whilst the student teachers are on practice. When compared with the student teachers’ perception of the relevance of the campus-based teaching, the experience of teaching practice is more strongly associated with affective commitment than the experience of the campus-based teaching. In a sense, the teaching-practice experiences thus enjoy primacy over the campus teaching in terms of the student teachers’ affective commitment. However, there is a weak negative association in the student teachers’ perception of the skills of the practice supervisors to link the theoretical basis of the teacher training to the students’ experiences during the practice period and their affective commitment. This suggests that the students do not experience an adequate degree of connectivity between the theoretical basis of the teaching studies and their teaching practice. This can be viewed in connection with the development of the teacher-training institutions and the institutional arrangement of the teaching programmes. The same empirical pattern is present in the associations between the relevance of the campus teaching and qualitative aspects of the practice supervision on the one hand and the tendency to consider quitting teacher training or not to begin as a teacher after the end of the course.

Our main conclusion is that qualitative aspects of practice supervision are more strongly associated with affective commitment and the intention to leave the teaching profession than qualitative aspects of the campus-based teaching. One of the implications is that there may well be justification for placing a greater emphasis on improving the training of practice supervisors and on points of contact between teacher educators and practice supervisors. 

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