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This chapter focuses on teaching practices used in multigrade classes and the importance of them being incorporated in teacher education as promising pedagogies for future use. Multigrade classes – defined as classes in which two or more grades are taught together – are common worldwide. Hence, there is a need for teacher candidates to become familiar with how to teach in split grade classrooms. However, research on multigrade teaching as well as its development in teacher education studies has been neglected, even though multigrade teachers need special skills to organize instruction in their heterogeneous classrooms. We argue that in successful multigrade teaching practices, the heterogeneity of students is taken into account and cultivated. Based on content analysis of teacher interviews conducted in Austrian and Finnish primary schools, we recommend teaching practices such as spiral curricula, working plans, and peer learning as promising teacher education pedagogies for future multigrade class teaching. We also suggest that the professional skills required in high-quality teaching practices in multigrade teaching should be further studied by researchers and educators.

The Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan was a signatory to the Jomtien Education for All agreement. Pursuing EFA in Bhutan presents a number of unique geographical, systemic, linguistic and other challenges, and the Royal Government of Bhutan has adopted multigrade school development as one major strategy in moving towards EFA. This adoption can be considered a form of policy borrowing. In this chapter we explore how multigrade schooling has been enhanced and expanded in Bhutan to achieve EFA goals, and in particular, the conditions under which multigrade teaching has become an accepted and important form of educational delivery in Bhutan. We trace the development of multigrade teaching to a set of partly planned and partly coincidental events and contexts. We review the geographical setting of Bhutan, local and global political events, teacher training issues, teacher upgrade programmes, contemporary discourses of education, development and modernization, and local initiatives to promote and strengthen multigrade teaching as a key strategy in providing access to school for children in remote areas. We also identify a number of challenges facing multigrade teaching, including the linguistic context, local reservations about the desirability of multigrade classes and resource issues.

The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) is mandated by the international community to collect, analyse and disseminate internationally comparable statistics on education, including those on and related to teachers. Based within a framework that emphasises quantity and quality issues for teachers, this chapter describes the current UIS international collection of teacher data, the policy options they intend to inform, as well as key limitations and challenges of the present data. In reaction to this, the chapter also presents UIS’s on-going developmental work related to the global data collection and statistics on primary and secondary teachers ranging from the measurement of current shortages, particularly in developing countries aiming to achieve universal primary education (UPE), to the expansion of an international framework that sheds additional light on teacher and teaching quality.

This scholarly work analyzes the previous 17 chapters in the International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part C) volume. The purpose of the analysis is to distill the essence of what constitutes promising international teacher education pedagogies and how those pedagogies can best be shared. The chapters are reviewed according to the sections in which they appeared: pedagogies of working with multimodalities; pedagogies of partnerships and communities; pedagogies of teacher assessment; and vehicles for teacher education research, and dissemination. Key knowledge contributions from each chapter are emphasized. Similarities between the featured pedagogies are also highlighted. Finally, overarching themes are pinpointed.

The literature on non-traditional classroom environments claims that the changed emphasis in higher education teaching from the lecturer to students has intensified the global focus on student-centred learning, prompting colleges and universities globally to introspect, re-examine, and re-structure their pedagogical approaches in an attempt to align with national educational policies, and to position themselves favourably with potential students in an increasingly competitive higher education environment. This is an environment that now relies heavily on digital learning technologies, which has provoked scholars such as Heick (2012) to perceive the change to the virtual as one that makes higher education institutions accessible from anywhere – in the cloud, at home, in the workplace, or restaurant. The COVID-19 crisis has reinforced the need for this flexibility. These forces have put universities and colleges under pressure to implement new teaching approaches in non-traditional classroom settings that are appropriate for, and responsive to, the COVID-19 crisis and students in terms of learning and social support. This chapter identified and appraised key teaching approaches. It is evident that there are three key teaching approaches that higher education institutions have adopted for delivering learning in an emergency and in a student-centred fashion. The three approaches, which include the time and place dispersion, transactional distance, and collaborative learning approaches, embrace social support because they are grounded in social constructivism. Academics need to be fully committed to the role of social support giving – that is, emotional, instrumental, informational, and appraisal support – in order to foster student wellbeing and cognitive development as students learn together but apart in non-traditional classrooms. The hurried manner in which teaching and learning practices in many higher education institutions have been moved to the online format has led academics to violate many key principles of the approaches they have adopted. And this situation is borne out in the case study discussed in Chapter 8 of this volume. A review of current remote teaching and learning practices is required if academics are to embrace the full principles of the approaches that are appropriate for teaching and learning in non-traditional classroom contexts.

This discussion essay provides an overview of teacher preparation programs in South Asia, detailing current innovative practices, challenges and trends regarding teacher education in the region. The chapter presents initiatives in several South Asian countries in terms of the design and implementation of in-service teacher trainings, pre-service teacher education programs, and distance education programs in South Asia. The main concept of the essay is to provide a comparative perspective to learn from field-based initiatives with the aim of improving the quality of the programs. It also highlights new trends such as the English education programs and ICT-based teacher training programs. It acknowledges that culture and context form a large part of the success for any education initiative. While doing so, a more holistic approach to improving teacher quality is emphasized. Finally, the essay concludes by sharing some ideas on developing conducive teaching–learning environments in the schools to support teachers. This essay should benefit policy makers and practitioners to: (a) obtain an overview of teacher quality programs in South Asia; and (b) comparatively learn from the experiences of countries in South Asia that have both numerous similarities and some differences.

Dalia Aralas is a doctoral research student at the University of Oxford Department of Educational Studies. Her doctoral research study, ‘Investigating Mathematical Imagination’, is supported by a four-year JPA Malaysia scholarship. She is a pure mathematician by training. She is a lecturer of Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) where she was the Coordinator of mathematics and science education before she left on study leave. She had academic and administrative responsibilities for coordinating academic programmes run jointly by the two Schools (faculties) of Education and Science. She has taught many undergraduate and postgraduate courses at UMS, including mathematics education, educational foundations and issues (philosophical perspectives). She was the head of the teacher training programme in mathematics and science. She directed the first of statewide UMS mathematics camps which have been held annually. She has also tutored and examined an undergraduate class in a course in mathematics education at the University of Oxford. Besides additional training in teaching mathematics, she also has a teaching certificate in dance. Her research interests include mathematics education, particularly the philosophical strand; imagination and agency; and research methodology.

Teacher education pedagogies face the complex challenge of attending to standards of professionalism while being sensitive to the local changing needs of professional learning. Encounters between these two aspects of professional work are manifested, for example, through the relations between innovative, “against the grain” pedagogies and standardized criteria and accountability to policy issues and measurement. This chapter characterizes various “contact zones” across participants, contexts and contents, called for by the four categories of pedagogies (working with multimodalities, partnerships and community learning, teacher assessment, and vehicles for dissemination) that comprise this volume of International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part C). The four categories of pedagogies join five earlier categories of pedagogies (teacher leadership, diversity, family, social justice, and technology), which are found in International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part B). These go in with yet another five categories of pedagogies (teacher selection, reflection, narrative knowing, teacher identity and mediation and mentoring), which are found in International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part A).