Worldwide, fragmentation and a disconnect from practice are ongoing challenges in teacher education, leading to low retention rates in the profession and to beginning teachers feeling unprepared (e.g., Ball & Cohen, 1999; Floden et al., 2020; Grossman et al., 2009). In Norway, much attention is paid to grounding teacher education in practice (Ministry of Education, 2017), and simultaneously, with the introduction of master level teacher education and a demand that at least half of the faculty have obtained a PhD or similar (Ministry of Education, 2014) attention is paid to academic standards. In this study, we investigate a 5-year teacher education program that has worked deliberately to improve the linkage to practice over time. Our guiding research question is: How do teacher candidates’ (TCs) opportunities to study practice at campus evolve over time? The studied program was redesigned in 2012 and employed more than 40 additional faculty in the period 2011-2016. TCs in their 7th semester in 2018 (N=75), 2020 (N=46), and 2021 (N=56) completed a survey, answering on a four-point scale how much opportunity they had to practice (1 = “no opportunities” – 4 = “extensive opportunities”). The first scale we address here is TCs’ opportunity to study practices close to pupils (e.g., study actual pupils’ work; 5 items; α=.73). The second scale addresses TCs’ opportunity to study practices more distant from pupils (e.g., see or analyze videos of classroom teaching; 7 items; α=.71). ANOVA comparing the three time points showed that the second scale (distant from pupils) did not differ across the timepoints (p >.05). TCs expressed an equal amount of opportunity to analyze videos, for example. However, the first scale, related to activities closer to the pupils, differed across time points. The 2018 TCs expressed to have more opportunity compared to the 2020 and 2021 TCs (F(2)=7.42, p=.001). These findings might of course reflect challenges due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Extensive digital teaching for the 2020 and 2021 cohorts may have constrained the teacher educators’ ability to employ methods that include opportunities to learn practices which are very close to pupils (Grossman et al., 2009). However, it might also indicate common challenges with securing the ongoing and dynamic process of creating a coherent program when new faculty joins the teaching force (e.g., Richmond et al., 2019). Diving into the program’s idiosyncrasies and further monitoring of the program combined with additional data is needed to investigate this in full.

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