THE ROLES OF TEACHING PRACTICE IN INITIAL TEACHER EDUCATION IN TIMOR-LESTE

Abstract
The Initial Teacher Education (ITE) of Universidade Nacional Timor Lorosa’e plays important role to provide professional educators around the territory of Timor Leste, since it was established. This research project was conducted during a period of 2020 - 2023. The study taken several phases and methods for collecting various perspectives: Semi-structured interviews with policy makers, university teacher educators, school supervisors, student teachers and documental analysis. The result shows that teaching practice plays important role for the improvement of student teachers teaching skills and self-confidence in dealing with the students in classroom teaching. Besides that, the profiles of teacher educators are some important factor to lead the students in teaching practice. Moreover, supervision from both university and school supervisors are extremely important for the successfulness of the field teaching practice. Finally, although student teachers and supervisors are working hard in teaching practice however, there are still some challenges in teaching practice due to lack adequate facilities support teaching and learning the teaching practice.
Keywords: Initial teacher education; Role of Teaching practice; Teacher educators