Novice Teachers’ Teaching Practices From The Perspectives of Expert Teachers in The Chinese Vocational Education Context

Novice teachers’ teaching practices have been studied widely, however, perspectives of expert teachers are missing from these studies. This study explores expert teachers’ opinions on novice teachers’ teaching practice by analysing three main components (problem, solution, and reasoning) of expert teachers’ feedback. The thematic analysis was used to analyse 29 feedback sessions between novice and expert teachers. After a bottom-up categorization, we generated 4 problem themes, 7 solution themes, and 4 reasoning themes. The most commonly mentioned problem, solution, and reasoning themes were, respectively, “teaching performance”, “include more variety of activities and materials”, and “students’ characteristics”. The connections between problem, solution and reasoning show that problem themes “teaching performance” and “materials and assignments”, solution theme “improve teachers’ knowledge or ability”, and reasoning theme “students’ characteristics” are most commonly connected to other feedback components. It indicates the importance of these themes in improving teachers’ teaching practices. Finally, suggestions were provided for policymakers, school leaders, and the TPD programmes.