The module described and evaluated in this paper arose from a concern to find creative ways to enable student teachers to deepen their personal practical knowledge of the teaching process and to help them develop agency and openness to the critique of their own and others’ practice.  Practical and experiential in design, the model uses video as one medium among others to give students the opportunity to encounter their own nascent personae as teachers. Working in teams the process set out to create a ‘safe-place’ for them to encounter reciprocal peer-observation (Gosling 2002) and cultivate among them positive dispositions in relation to collaborative practice for future their professional and pedagogical settings.

That student teachers need opportunities for discussion that probes their personal and practical knowledge landscapes (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) is widely accepted. Finding ways to enable them appreciate the complexities involved in teaching and learning is less obvious. According to Schuck et al (2008) processes to support this should include at least the following: a willingness to take risks, a respect for another’s expertise in teaching and an ability to reflect collaboratively on teaching and learning. Schuck and her colleagues also discuss how intensely personal professional learning is for teachers: opening our practice up to others provides insight into our teaching personae as well as our teaching practices (Schuck et al. 2008: 225). The Learning to Teach Study (LETS) report reminds us that teachers“come into teaching with well-formed initial teacher identities, teacher education involves re-negotiation of those cultural scripts” (Conway et al. 2011:  29). Such re-negotiation is a difficult and complex task. An increasingly popular way to foster critical reflection and self- as well as peer-analysis of teaching is through the affordances of video technology (Rickard et al.  2009, Harford and MacRuaric 2008).

Initiated in Autumn 2011 and entitled CRiSTaL (Critical Reflection in Science Teaching and Learning) the initiative developed to address these concerns was introduced into the second year undergraduate BSc Science Education programme in our institution in advance of beginning student teachers undertaking their first teaching practice placement.  It coincided with their initial period of observation in schools. Our aim was to position them to reflect on the teaching they would see in these contexts, to experience working closely with each other at an early stage in their development as teachers and also to enable them to engage directly in the planning and delivering stimulating and engaging lessons of a student-centred collaborative kind. 

Student teachers’ conceptualisation of teaching and their reflection on collaboration in teaching and learning needs to happen in the university context before it is possible to explore it in the classroom level. This engagement is about both absorbing and being absorbed in a culture of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991).

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