Search results

Are education systems converging toward a global model of teacher education or do local models tend to predominate in spite of attempts to reform them? How much do global, national, and local cultures shape and condition future teachers’ opportunities to learn to teach? How do these opportunities influence teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge? In this chapter we use data from the IEA’s first study of the effectiveness of pre-service teacher education in order to investigate teacher education policy, program structure, and outcomes. Using multilevel modeling we found that across countries individual characteristics have a similar and powerful influence on what future teachers come to know at the end of their pre-service programs. The effects of teacher education curriculum on future teachers’ mathematics pedagogical content knowledge reaffirm the prevalence of local cultures on the implementation of an increasingly globalized ideal. We conclude that while the provision of teacher education shares many common features in goals and structure across countries, it is strongly influenced by local conditions and norms, and by cultural notions of the knowledge that is considered essential – framing how quality is to be defined and operationalized – when learning to teach.

Challenge-based learning (CBL) is assumed to be particularly relevant in training future teachers, as an active learning approach, centered on the student, based on the resolution of scientific/societal challenges in interdisciplinary teams, with external partners, and over three stages (involving, investigating, and act).

The global aim of the “Form@tive – train future teachers to teach children through CBL” project is to promote active learning based on challenges, integrating different curricular units (CUs) of a course, through CBL. The Form@tive project has concluded the first cycle of implementation in early 2021, in two stages, the first in the context of a Degree in Basic Education in the academic year 2019/2020 and the second stage in three educational professional master's degrees. The results of the monitoring process of the first cycle of implementation state, among other aspects, the need: (1) of better communication between the teachers of the different CUs involved; (2) for the solutions developed to be actually implemented (not implemented due to the pandemic situation); (3) to be provided a more individualized orientation (a dedicated tutor for each group); (4) of less demand on teaching load (overload of tasks requested simultaneously); (5) to be developed not only during a semester but along the academic year; and (6) to also include the Technology and Arts filed, since it could benefit the creation of more innovative and appealing resources and presentations, among others. Recommendations for training future teachers to teach children through CBL are, thus, presented and discussed in this chapter.

This chapter attempts to conclude this periodised collection by contemplating the future of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in Scotland over a timeframe of the next 10–20 years. It develops a framework of antecedents of change drawn from the accounts, analysis and milestones presented in the preceding chapters. Five main wellsprings of change are articulated reflecting how teacher preparation has been cast and influenced by politics, economic circumstances, changes in the sociocultural order, important shifts in the intellectual climate together with the decisions and actions of institutional or individual actors. Using the framework, three scenarios for the future of teacher education in Scotland are sketched out in brief. Futurologists and strategic thinkers have used the development of scenarios as a technique or method to contend with multiple conceivable possibilities and to contain the unpredictability of possible futures. The scenarios presented in this chapter are offered as a stimulus for future-orientated thinking and action. The final section highlights dimensions of ITE that are tangibly within the reach of teacher educators in forging a future in which Scotland remains, in a context of global comparison, a jurisdiction providing ITE of the highest quality.

The purpose of this paper is to open up the question of how we prepare people to be resilient, flexible and capable of managing the uncertainties and complexities of the twenty‐first century by using both futures studies and complexity theory as a backdrop for a discussion of career education and teacher education in the future.

Recent developments in the work of others in futures studies and complexity theory are presented. These developments provide a framework for discussing current understandings of career and teacher education and to explore the possible trajectories for supporting learning to, in and through work across the lifespan.

Through applying futures studies and complexity theory to career and teacher education the authors conclude that these conceptual frameworks have much to offer practitioners and policy makers in the fields of career education and teacher education, and that theory development in these fields is already embracing the conceptual tools within these areas of study.

Suggestions are made for what will be needed in the future and how educational organisations will have to adapt in order to promote resilience and flexibility in the face of the uncertainty and complexity of learning and work in the twenty‐first century.

This paper brings together four distinct areas of research and scholarship – i.e. complexity theory, futures studies, career and teacher education – in order to explore possible and desirable trajectories for supporting learning to, in and through work across the lifespan.

Teachers at the tertiary level play an essential role in the expansion of quality in higher education. The issue of competence and its development has particular importance in creating the new landscape of the twenty-first century. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop validated inventory identifying future-oriented competences required for the teaching profession in the changing environment of higher education institutions (HEIs).

In the study, teacher competences and related teacher’s behavior were theoretically defined and underwent principal factor analysis. The survey was carried out among teachers, students and graduates of HEIs in India.

The analysis revealed future-oriented teacher competences resulting from the globalization process of the teaching profession. Testing the inventory indicated that there was a high Cronbach’s α reliability. Results show that the inventory enjoyed proper internal consistency for four dimensions as general teaching competences. The inventory with 66 items and four factors explained 47.279 percent of the total variance and indicated a strong factor model.

Teacher competence inventory (TCI) can be used to modernize study programs of teacher education and shift focus toward future-oriented competences required for the teaching profession in HEIs in India. Therefore, TCI could be essential to prepare teachers for the changing environment of teaching.

This study is an essential step in reorienting the process of teacher education toward professional development aimed at developing future-oriented competences in the teaching profession. It proposes to develop an instrument measuring teacher competences areas and related teacher behavior.

Policy makers, professional associations and scholars continue to advocate for the integration of enhanced clinical experiences for future teachers’ preparation. These recommendations reflect the growing recognition that few events in preservice teachers’ education are more significant than their experiences in the classrooms of veteran peers. Aware of the fact that the field of teacher education needs examples of effective clinical experiences, the authors examined the “critical, project-based” (CPB) model, employing Photovoice activities in a dropout prevention course in a secondary education partner school at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned objective.

Aware that the field of teacher education needs examples of effective clinical experiences, the authors examined the CPB model, employing Photovoice activities in a dropout prevention course in a secondary education partner school at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article they detail a practitioner research examination that explores the experiences of 12 preservice middle/high school teachers, reporting on these individuals’ considerations of general pedagogies, writing instruction strategies and teaching personas.

Results suggest that preservice teachers might best identify pedagogical practices that are consistent with their nascent teaching identities via experiences that occur in school-university partnerships in which future teachers are positioned as pedagogues.

This manuscript explores the use of the “CPB” clinical experience model, identifying the impacts of this approach for preparing future teachers.

Compares the views of pre‐service and in‐service elementary school teachers regarding the effectiveness of school leaders in Cyprus. Data were collected from 66 in‐service teachers, and 79 pre‐service teachers enrolled at the University of Cyprus. The findings indicate that in‐service teachers were significantly more positive than pre‐service teachers in their assessment of school principals. The former considered the weaknesses associated with principals to be mainly the result of the limitations of the educational system in Cyprus, whereas the latter expected their future superiors to be ineffective in their management of interpersonal relationships. The paper points to the need for better training and preparation of both school leaders and teachers before their appointments.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the relationship between teachers’ professional role, their sense of empowerment, and their attitudes toward managerial promotion (career development) following the implementation of educational forms.

The study was conducted in Israel in 2015 and included 663 teachers, 250 elementary school teachers and 413 middle or high school teachers. A questionnaire and statistical analyses (ANOVA, multivariate analysis, and correlations) examined the attitudes of teachers in one of four professional roles toward managerial promotion (their desire for future promotion and sense of organizational fairness). This was compared with their sense of empowerment (comprising feeling respected, professional growth, influence, autonomy, self-efficacy, and decision making), while controlling for their demographic and professional backgrounds.

Four-fifths of teachers were interested in pursuing managerial promotion and they perceived the promotion process as moderately fair. The greater teachers’ sense of empowerment, the greater their desire for future promotion and their belief in the fairness of the promotional process. Teachers currently holding a leadership position expressed the strongest sense of empowerment.

The study presents a multivariate model to predict teachers’ attitudes to managerial promotion on the basis of their professional role and sense of empowerment. The findings have implications for educational policy-making, particularly where there is a national focus on increasing school autonomy.

The findings will contribute to local and international research on teacher empowerment and career development.

To describe how a digital storytelling project used in preservice elementary literacy methods courses expands the notion of video reflection and offers an intentional zone of contact in which preservice teachers create their own idealized vision of their future classroom.

Using the multimodal text as a point of departure, each researcher used a different analytical method to approach the data, allowing for examination of different aspects of the product and process of digital storytelling. These analysis methods include theoretically driven analysis based upon theories of Bakhtin (1981) and Vygotsky (1978), metaphor analysis, and performative analysis. This chapter describes the findings from each analytic lens, as well as the affordances of the multiple research lenses.

The results of the study shed light on how preservice teachers constructed a dialogue around their beliefs about themselves as teachers and visions of their future classrooms. The space between the real and the imagined provided a critical writing space where preservice teachers were able to vision their evolving identity and make visible their negotiation of intellectual, social, cultural, and institutional discourses they encountered. These artfully communicated stories engaged preservice teachers in creating new meanings, practices, and experiences as they explored possibilities and imagined themselves in their future classrooms. In these compositions, the preservice teachers maintained, disrupted, and/or reinvented classroom contexts to accommodate their own understandings of literacy teaching and learning.

The zones of contact that were consciously created in this digital storytelling assignment allowed teacher educators to provide the cognitive dissonance which research shows makes teacher beliefs more amenable. Additionally, asking preservice teachers to engage in the type of analysis described in this chapter may prove to be a useful avenue for helping to make the negotiation that took place during the composing of the digital stories more explicit for the preservice teachers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how well Chinese teacher education positions itself in preparing qualified teachers for its vast k‐12 education system, especially in the transition from examination‐oriented to that of future‐oriented education.

This paper looks at literature discussing background, strengths and weakness of current Chinese teacher training programs. It also employs the Delphi‐based scenario research method to explore plausible futures of curriculum design for teacher education.

The paper finds that, in order to ensure its astonishing economic development and present itself as a constructive force to the world betterment, it is crucial for China to carry on its ongoing educational reform, especially in the area of curriculum for its teacher training programs. It also concludes that the disciplinary curriculum currently employed in Chinese teacher education should be shifted to the trans‐disciplinary curriculum to produce future‐oriented and internationally‐prepared graduates the country demands in its effort to play an important role on the international stage.

This research, while meriting the structured instruction displayed by the Chinese education system, argues that the system should strive to provide students with such skills as creativity, flexibility, initiative, leadership, all necessary in the globally connected future world. The second part of this paper will focus on four scenarios as a result of his recent research among Chinese educators and administrators.