Teaching through interactions as framework and tool to promote dialogue and coherence in multidisciplinary teacher education and development

The present work is an investigation into how the framework for teaching quality, Teaching through Interactions (TTI), can function as a tool for the supervision of pre-service teacher students and promote coherence in multidisciplinary contexts. Ten pre-service teacher students’ lessons were analysed using the TTI-based observation manual Classroom Assessment Scoring System, CLASS, giving rise to three strategies for utilising the framework: (a) comparing individual teacher students’ CLASS scores with data from published studies; (b) identifying and exploring CLASS dimensions with high internal variability among teacher students or school subjects; and (c) starting from a subject-specific theoretical perspective, exploring quantitative and qualitative aspects of a selected CLASS dimension. These approaches provide common language to promote coherence across subjects and between theory and practice, expanding CLASS as a tool in multidisciplinary contexts. This remedies some of the challenges with generic observation systems whilst maintaining a language that is useful across subject boundaries.