In the past decade and a half, teacher education in Iceland has undergone extensive reform. In 2008, legislation was passed that required a master’s degree for teacher certification (Act No. 87/2008). Since then, changes have also been made to field practice in teacher education, both regarding its length and implementation. The most recent changes, implemented in 2019, have given teacher candidates the option of a paid internship in schools in their final year of study. However, despite such rapid changes and extensive reform, little research has specifically examined teacher preparation in Iceland or whether the mentioned reforms have indeed improved the preparation of student teachers for real-world work as teachers (Sigurðsson, Björnsdóttir & Jóhannsdóttir in press).

Teacher education has often been criticised for being fragmented and for the lack of connection between courses taught in teacher education programmes and the actual classroom practices of teachers in schools (Darling-Hammond, 2017; Moon, 2016, Zeikner, 2010). This is true in Iceland and also in many European countries. Practice shock, a term sometimes used to describe the divide between teacher education and the reality of practice in schools, is experienced by many novice teachers as they transition from being students to being teachers (Caspersen & Raaen, 2014; Smith et al., 2013). Although the challenge is nothing new (Schuck et al., 2018), teacher educators have pointed to the scarcity of opportunities to practice, study, or rehearse actual teaching as a major cause for the divide between theory and practice (Kennedy, 1999). In fact, research on teacher education in past decades has indicated that a key feature of teacher preparation is providing student teachers with the opportunities to learn and practice things that are grounded in the actual work of teaching. Large-scale studies have also indicated that teachers provided with such opportunities in the context of teaching practice prove to be more effective teachers (National Research Council, 2010; see also Boyd et al., 2009; Hammernes & Klette, 2015).

The purpose of our study was to examine the extent to which student teachers in Iceland, namely at the University of Iceland and at the University of Akureyri, view their teacher education programmes as being coherent and grounded in practice. Those two teacher education programmes are responsible for the education of more than 95% of teacher candidates in Iceland each year. Because the programmes differ extensively in size and content but both require extensive field practice in the candidate’s final year of study, we considered it to be relevant to compare them.

A total of 178 student teachers in their last year of study in five-year teacher education in Iceland participated in the study. The students came from University of Iceland and University of Akureyri. Participants completed an online questionnaire survey designed to better understand the pedagogical aspect of teacher education (see Hammerness and Klette 2015). The survey was developed within the CATE study (Coherence and Assignments Study in Teacher Education see Hammerness et. al. 2020). A questionnaire that has been used for research in many countries and teacher education institutions was translated to Icelandic by a expert in the subject matter and back translated to English and compared to the original version to prevent bias caused by differences in translation. The focus of the current analysis is on a part of the questionnaire that is four scales intended to measure the following: (1) "opportunities to enact practice", (10 items), (2) "opportunities to connect various parts of the program", (5 items), (3)"coherence between courses", (8 items) and (4) "coherence between field experience and courses", (3 items). The scales all had good internal consistency with Cronbach’s alpha ranging from .72 – .85.

Our results indicate that student teachers in teacher education programmes at both the University of Iceland and University of Akureyri receive quite a few opportunities to practise teaching methods. For example, they reported having ample opportunities to create lesson plans and discuss their experiences in their own student teaching but few opportunities to see and work with real examples from lessons (e.g. watching or analyse videos of teaching in the classroom). That indicates a weakness in teachers’ preparation because those types of opportunities can enable student teachers to envision good teaching and provide opportunities to systematically adopt such practices (Jenset et al., 2018; Penuel et al., 2020). Our results also indicate that student teachers generally perceive a reasonable amount of coherence between courses, although ones at the University of Iceland reported experiencing a greater connection between the theoretical and practical parts of their programme than students at the University of Akureyri. That difference may be explained by the different structures surrounding field practice in the last year of study. In particular, the connection between university courses and field practice seems relatively stronger at the University of Iceland, where academic staff who have previously taught the students teachers meet with them weekly to offer support and facilitate the connection between teacher education at the university and students’ work in the schools. At the University of Akureyri, by comparison, a special project manager who is not a member of the academic staff and does not teach courses has that responsibility. The meetings with the students are also not as frequent. This points to the importance to work closely with student teachers to improve the connection between the theory and practice.

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