Teacher education is an important part of our education system. We need highly professional teachers to support lifelong learning from nurseries to universities and beyond (OECD, 2016). It has therefore raised concern that student teachers find it hard to see the relevance and use of theory during their practicum (Bronkhorst, Meijer, Koster, & Vermunt, 2011; Smith & Sela, 2005). When the perceived relevance of theory is absent in the student teachers’ professional development they tend to have trouble understanding and analysing their own experiences since they lack the tools theory represents (Orland-Barak & Tillema, 2006). A great deal of effort and research has been invested in how this gap between theory and practice can be closed. It seems to be an agreement on the importance of reflection (Davis, 2006; de Beer, Petersen, & Dubar-Krige, 2012; Korthagen & Vasalos, 2005). Reflection is said to be one of the fundamental practices in teacher education, and is also claimed to be an important key to bridge the gap described above (Bronkhorst et al., 2011; Brown, Holt-Macey, Martin, Skau, & Vogt, 2015; Tillema & Orland-Barak, 2006; West, 2011).

The aim of the current paper is to contribute to the student teachers understanding of how theory and practice interact and explain each other. The paper draws on an empirical study investigating a reflective learning process supported by handheld and cloud based technology. To be more specific we will discuss findings on how teacher students and their supervisors can realise the unused potential present in the discourse before, during, and after a supervised lesson.

The study takes place in a Norwegian context at a lower secondary school and is a small-scale qualitative intervention study. Four second-year student teachers are observed through their second part of practicum, which will last for three weeks. A fifth-grade teacher at the school is mentoring the students. Every student is expected to perform as teachers in approximately ten of the mentor’s classes during this time. When the students are not performing as teachers they are expected to observe their mentor or peers teaching.  The students will have a group session with their mentor before and after every class they have participated in either as teacher or observer. The students and their mentor are given access to a software developed specifically for the purpose of mentoring different types of learning in authentic or real-life contexts. The software is cloud-based and non-dependent on platform. It can be run on smartphones, tablets and computers and the students and their mentor can upload, comment on, and access text, video, pictures and audio files in real-time. In this study, the core reflection described in Korthagen and Vasalos’ (2005) onion-model is central. The idea is to help the student teachers to go beyond the usual superficial reflection that barely touches the surface of practice (Orland-Barak & Tillema, 2006). Asking questions about what really happens in the observed lecture, supported by multimodal representations, seems to force the level of reflection deeper, and even open up for teacher student development of practice theory (Orland-Barak & Yinon, 2007). Reflection may then result in more than cosmetic changes and development of practice,  (Day, 1999). 

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