Teaching profession requires a university degree in the Czech Republic, yet only about half of the graduates of teaching programmes enter the profession and about a quarter of the teacher population remains unqualified. With the school system facing structural problems such as low proportion of new teachers entering the profession, high drop-out of beginner teachers, teacher shortages and high prevalence of the burn-out syndrome in the teacher population (Smetackova, 2017), the quality of the mainstream university teacher education and its capacity to prepare adequately competent teachers is put into question. In this context, the need for effective teacher preparation including sufficient reflected practical training has been emphasised. 

The innovative teacher training programme Teach Live addresses the above stated issues by the development of a post-graduate, fully accredited two-year training course for graduates of non-teaching university programmes. The goal of this programme is to prepare teachers with a considerable self-efficacy and a solid will to contribute to their pupil wellbeing in school while fully developing the potential of each pupil.  Also teachers who have a high level of instructional efficacy function on the belief that difficult students are teachable through extra effort and appropriate techniques. (Bandura 1997 in Zulkosky). The programme design is based on the reflective teacher education model (Korthagen, 2011) and it consists of 370 hours of training with an integrated curriculum and reflective seminars and 380 hours of practice on two school placements (each one year long) - such amount of practical training is unique in the Czech context. At the schools, the student teachers cooperate with mentors who observe their classes and provide them with feedback. They also experience pair teaching and shared lesson planning. The mentors are provided with training and individual support and an emphasis is put on the development of school partnerships. The connection between the theory and practice is ensured by constant reflection on practice, series of case studies, video reflections, sitting in on the classes by the course lecturers and the personal development goal that students continuously work on throughout the programme.

Teach Live aims to create a laboratory that will develop, test out and disseminate new models for teacher training. The results of the laboratory's work should offer inspiration, specific examples, well-grounded arguments and evidence to strengthen the preparation of future teachers. In the future, Teach Live also wishes to run bachelors and masters degree university programmes. It is therefore important to assess the quality of the teacher education programme. For this reason, an extensive longitudinal evaluation has been launched in January 2019. Previous external evaluation of the programme has identified the following key characteristics of the programme: respectful learning community, individual approach, democratic values, quality of instruction, experiential learning and emphasis on reflection (Pol, Lazarova, 2017). 

The evaluation research presented in this paper follows on these findings and further evaluates the quality and effectiveness of the programme by following research areas:  

• How is the training programme evaluated by the participants and which of its components are of the highest benefit to the participants?

• How do Teach Live graduates compare to novice teachers / graduates of educational faculties in self-efficacy? How do Teach Live graduates improve their teaching self-efficacy throughout the course of the programme? 

• How many of Teach Live graduate enter the teaching profession and are Teach Live graduate going to teach in general public or selective/private schools?

• How are the subjects taught by Teach Live graduates in primary and middle schools evaluated by their pupils in comparison to the given subject taught by other teachers in the past / in comparison to other school subjects? 

The research methodology has been informed by current research on teacher education, specifically teacher development through reflection on practice and teacher self-efficacy, as well as by relevant approaches in evaluation research and by inspiration from organisations conducting high quality evaluations of teacher preparation programmes (such as Boston Teacher Residency, Teach First, APA Task Force Report on Evaluating Teacher Education Programs). Teach Live evaluation takes a mixed-methods approach utilizing a combination of qualitative (in-class observation, teaching-video analysis, focus groups) and quantitative (self-evaluation questionnaires, standardised assessment sheets for lecturers, activity time-sheets) instruments. We consider it crucial to gather data from all the (and all types of) programme participants. Evaluation therefore collects data from students of the programme, the programme’s core team of lecturers, mentor teachers who accompany Teach Live students during their in-classroom practice, as well as the pupils taught by the Teach Live students in their training schools. All the available instruments and data sources are integrated in a comprehensive framework specifying the programme’s intended outcomes on its students divided into 8 areas of teaching competences. During the presentation only a subset of the most substantial and relevant evaluation results will be presented. This includes responses to self-evaluation questionnaires dealing with self-efficacy and self-concept, student feedback on the training course questionnaires, standardised sheets for student performance assessment, and activity timesheets specifying individual hands-on teaching practice content, along with relevant comparative analyses. Besides presenting instruments that were tailor-made for the programme itself, the results of two external renowned instruments will be presented – the official Czech version of the teacher’s self-efficacy measure from TALIS 2013 (as the 2018 results were not yet available at the time) and the Czech version of the Academic Optimism scale as administered in CLoSE (Czech Longitudinal Study in Education, a 7-year longitudinal research project on skill acquisition, and achievement). Teach Live students’ responses were then compared to various subsets of Czech teachers from the two aforementioned survey data.

Students evaluate reflective practice and the combination of pair and individual teaching as the most beneficial in their learning process. Comparing the structure of their school placement with self-efficacy and “grading” from lecturers suggests the ones with proper combination of individual and pair teaching practice perform better. All components of self-efficacy show linear improvement during the two-year training which proves that longer period of teacher training is beneficial. Teach Live graduates perform better in key components of self-efficacy than a standard population of novice teachers included in TALIS and CLoSE surveys. However, they have problems with long-term planning and behavioural interventions. This is confirmed by the view of other actors - lecturers, pupils, mentors. These and other findings are being used to improve the programme. Possible improvements of our evaluation (improving the framework of competencies, using propensity score matching for comparing the students with a control group) will be discussed.

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