Pre-service early childhood teachers’ reflections on specialist teaching methods and their experiences regarding the transfer of knowledge from theory to practice

This study explored 20 pre-service early childhood (EC) teachers’ reflections on specialist teaching methods – co-constructing, deconstructing, and community building – along with their experiences relating to the theory-practice gap phenomenon. The study employed a phenomenological approach to investigate the reflections and experiences of pre-service EC teachers enrolled in a public university in Türkiye. This study was grounded in Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle (1988) as a theoretical and methodological framework. Data were collected during a 13-week ‘teaching methods’ course from six sources, including in-class group activities, self-reflections, peer evaluations, activity plans, an open-ended survey, and a focus group interview. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to analyse the data. The results showed that participants tended to focus more on practice than on theoretical knowledge across the three specialist teaching methods. Additionally, they had difficulties transferring theoretical knowledge into practice, which was consistent with the literature highlighting the ‘theory-practice gap’ in teacher education.