The Centre of Practical Training, now the Department of Pedagogical Practice, provides conceptual, organizational and administrative pedagogical practice for the majority of the study programmes with a pedagogical-psychological module in their study plan.
The department was established in 1992 as part of the Department of Education and Psychology. Its basic and main task was to ensure the practical aspect of preparing students of teacher training programmes at the faculty level.
In close connection with setting up this workplace, a network of faculty and cooperating primary and secondary schools in Liberec and its surroundings began to emerge, where students were introduced to pedagogical “fieldwork” through their first practical experience. Over the following years, this network of faculty schools was expanded to include schools with an alternative programme, private, small-class and special schools. An integral part of the network of faculty schools is also the network of faculty nursery schools, which was created after 2015 in connection with the approved accreditation of the Teaching for Nursery Schools study programme.
In 2007, the department’s status changed and it was separated from its home department and became a department of the Dean's Office for the Faculty of Education. The department was renamed the Centre for Practical Training. In the framework of unifying the Dean's Office, the department was returned to its original name - the Department of Teaching Practice (DTP) in 2020.
The DTP relies on the excellent functioning collaboration with an already quite extensive network of faculty and cooperating schools and works closely with trainee teachers. From 2017-2020, mentoring workshops for teachers from faculty schools were held and the concept of reflective and self-reflective pedagogical practices was set up. Both didacticians from the departments, but also didacticians from the Department of Education and Psychology, the Department of Primary Education and the Department of Special Education are involved in supervising the practice. During their practice lessons in classrooms with a wide range of pupils with individual learning needs, students can reflect on the subject-specific nature of their subjects, as well as on pedagogical, psychological and special educational issues.
The Department of Pedagogical Practice takes part in regularly organizing seminars for trainee teachers on topics that are in demand in primary schools (e.g. cooperative forms of work, working with problem pupils, mathematics by Prof. Hejný, formative assessment...). Likewise, teachers from the schools teach in tandem with academics and take part in faculty seminars.
