Background The design and development of the Scottish Teachers for a New Era (STNE) Bachelor of Education programme is orientated by a socio-constructivist framework which puts dialogue, sharing of perspectives, and peer-work as central to the learning experience. The value-base is that of collaboration and social justice. However, for such values to become embedded in the practice of student teachers, the aims of teaching, curriculum design and assessment need to be brought into alignment. For such purpose, internally-driven reviews have been built within the programme. Theoretical frame Darling-Hammond (2006) advocated continuous evaluation for on-going programme design, development and implementation. However, there are many concerns that need to be addressed to ensure reliable evaluation. Bonner (2003) identified a lack of programme clarity and the resultant fragmentation of evaluation focus. Borich and Jemelka (1982) recognized a lack of a vehicle for engendering a feeling of ownership among stakeholders resulting in failure to embed evaluation in a programme. In addition, evaluation is limited when educational institutions rely exclusively on students’ perceptions, experiences and test results. These concerns call for caution when designing evaluation and implementing evaluation evidence and findings as a basis for programme decisions. Effective evaluation requires professional judgment of evaluation principles and teacher education, thereby premising it on both theoretical and empirical knowledge. Stake (2004) postulated a responsive evaluation based on the idea that the scope and nature of the evaluation be determined on the basis of the stakeholder input. Such studies take accounts of principles of the programme being evaluated against the expectations and satisfactions of the appropriately selected individuals. This evaluation model is premised on a constructivist paradigm, whereby the evaluators tease out multiple perspectives in an attempt to reach a consensus about the programme being evaluated (Alkins and Christie, 2004).

Methodology The STNE programme evaluation seeks to be a multi-dimensional and participatory process. Members share their beliefs about teacher education and the dialogue is useful in addressing individual values and realigning them with the programme, principles, goals and objectives. The underpinning questions are: “what are the stakeholders’ perceptions and experiences of teaching and learning within the STNE programme?” and “To what extent do they comply with the programme aims”? Stakeholders respond to a variety of issues such as: the design and structure of courses, the design of field experience, course contents, learning and teaching activities, course objectives sequencing of courses, the principles of the programme. Data is collected from a variety of sources by means of quantitative and qualitative methods.

Research findings/contribution to knowledge Programme evaluation is an on-going activity. A number of themes are emerging from initial data analysis. The entry data shows some of the qualities which students bring on the programme and which are a reflection of the values embedded in the selection procedure. The longitudinal data shows critical moments of development of teacher professional identity. The results obtained from common course evaluation and students’ interviews shows that the notion of social justice and professionalism were juxtaposed to reveal the underlying notion of power that student teachers started to grapple with. The curricular knowledge evaluation, exit data collection and field experience observation is in progress. It is anticipated that these will be evaluated alongside the emerging findings from existing data sets. Research findings from this exercise can contribute to knowledge in educational effectiveness, quality assurance and teacher educational research.