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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.

This chapter explores the difference in two orientations – didaktik and curriculum – and examines how these differing stances relate to teachers’ instructional practice, engagement with professional development opportunities, and lesson design. A didaktik orientation influences much of the Nordic and Germanic countries, while a curriculum orientation is widespread in Commonwealth of Nations and the United States. This chapter explores the differences between these two theories of learning and teaching. More than just different theories of teaching and learning, we argue these theories shape how we see the world (i.e., objectified vs. subjectified) and manifest themselves in distinctive understandings of schools’ purpose, the type of learning engaged therein, and how people learn. Consequently, these orientations affect the teacher’s role, the qualifications necessary to teach, as well as other aspects of teacher quality such as instructional methods, and types of professional development.

Background: Most children in low-income countries complete their elementary education with low competency in essential reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. Besides, about 250 million students are not learning the basics, most of whom have spent at least four years in school, and this failure is coined the global learning crisis. This study aimed to examine educational quality management practices perceived by secondary school teachers.

Methods: The study employed a multilevel mixed-method design. Employing a simple random sampling technique, the researcher selected 251 teachers from 10 secondary schools in the research regions. He collected data through a researcher-designed questionnaire, school standards, and student achievement records from November 2018 to March 2019. He analyzed data from a questionnaire using frequency, percentage, mean, Pearson correlation, and exploratory factor analysis. The document review concerning quality management was analyzed using content analysis to triangulate the quantitative findings.

Results: At the school level, the study revealed the impracticality of laboratories. Besides, incompetent and unmotivated teachers and students ran the education business from the input side. At the same level, principals' management practices on staff development and encouraging parents to support their schools were low. The principals' management practices in the teaching-learning process were also undesirable at the classroom level. Overall, the study revealed incredibly insufficient input, process, and output management in the study context.

Conclusion: Hence, the study concluded that it is difficult to achieve the very objectives of producing creative, critical, and problem-solving individuals through this type of educational provision and its management. Due to this, it is not easy to achieve quality education for all goals.

This research treated the secondary school teachers as the research scale and the research targets included the following: secondary school (employ unit), center of teacher education, and qualified teachers. In terms of these three groups of people, the topics of exploration focused on the perception of suitable teachers, perception of evaluation standard during the process of teacher examination and the relationship among teacher examination systems. The research was managed by two phases: the first phase referred to literature reorganization, expert interview, the qualities and conditions of suitable teachers, important evaluation standard during the process of teacher examination and teacher examination system used; the second phase included questionnaire survey, employ school acquisition, the perception of centers of teacher education and qualified teachers toward the suitability condition and examination evaluation standard in the first phase and teacher examination system used. This research found out that as to the perception of suitable teachers, through data collection, there were six factors reorganized. The levels of their importance were as follows: education devotion, teaching capacity, class management, capacity to guide special students, capacity to communicate with the parents and the will to undertake administrative works. Noticeably, employee unit and centers of teacher education apparently valued class management more, compared with trained teachers; as to evaluation standard of examination, the analytical result found out that the perception of three groups were different in terms of the views toward educational works, written examination data, candidate’s age, club experience at school and capacity to use multimedia support teaching materials. This research further proposed six suggestions for centers of teacher education and trained teachers: (1) employ schools considerably valued educational devotion; (2) trained teachers tended to neglect the importance of class management; (3) employee unit considerably cared about the new teachers’ competence to use multimedia support teaching materials; however, trained teachers did not have the same view; (4) employee unit considerably cared about new teachers’ views toward educational works as well as the candidates’ ages; (5) generally speaking, trained teachers neglected the importance of club experience at school; (6) the data revealed that written examination data was not relatively important in terms of teacher examination

With growing emphasis being placed on the selection of highly qualified teachers, it is inevitable that policies and practices of teacher selection will become more methodical. This chapter explores systematic practices of selecting preservice teachers by examining local/national policies related to teacher selection in South Korea. The first part of this chapter explains why a conceptual understanding is essential to understanding the Korean educational context. Included is a short explanation of various approaches to improve teacher selection processes and procedures. The work is based on the assumption that effective teachers can be chosen by implementing an effective teacher selection system. The second part outlines the current process of teacher selection in South Korea, along with the issues and challenges surrounding practices related to teacher selection. In South Korea, teaching is still considered a highly desirable profession compared to other countries, as well as to other occupations in South Korea. Hence, a huge number of teacher candidates and preservice teachers must pass through many steps before becoming certified as teachers. They also must take national and district tests. The teacher selection system in South Korea is highly centralized and more complicated than most other countries. In this chapter, the teacher selection system in South Korea is critically analyzed in an effort to identify strengths and weaknesses in national policy and practices related to teacher selection. The final part of the chapter discusses implications based on the analysis of the teacher selection system in South Korea.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze how the Swedish Association of Biology Teachers (ABT) and some other subject associations helped form pre-service biology teacher education in two major Swedish reforms from ca. 1960 to 1990.

The activities of subject associations can be understood as boundary-work since they defend their subject boundaries in terms of content, space in the timetable, and legitimacy. A hermeneutic method of text interpretation is employed in analyzing historical archival and parliamentary material.

The work of the ABT to demarcate their subject in the 1968 and 1988 Teacher Education Reforms may seem like merely defending certain biological items instead of others, in the name of science. However, it was also a professional struggle to assert the importance of the teachers, their jobs, education, knowledge of biology subject matter, and thereby their professional authority and autonomy. The ABT were also caught in a political struggle for their subject throughout the period of investigation. Depending on the political winds of the time they therefore had to ally themselves with or distance themselves from various actors.

In comparison with the few other studies of subject associations, this paper is unique in outlining how the ABT acted in relation to teacher education. However, the ways of doing boundary-work were still very similar to those used by subject associations in schools in other countries, especially in acting for increased study time in their respective science subjects as well as their resistance to subject integration. An obvious conclusion regarding teacher education is that subject associations such as the ABT did not contribute to bridging the gap between subject matter and pedagogy but rather the opposite. Biology teacher education was seen as an academic pursuit carried out at universities rather than at the practically oriented teacher training colleges.

Division D was one of a number of post‐primary teacher preparation initiatives introduced to address a severe staffing shortage in New Zealand which, by 1960, had reached crisis point. This paper explores the origins of the problem of teacher supply and locates the establishment of Division D within the ideological and practical context within which the problem was posed and confronted. It suggests that, because the students entered the profession without the university qualifications which had traditionally defined eligibility to teach in New Zealand secondary schools, the course presented contradictions as both a solution to the Department’s problem of supply, and a problem for status within the profession.

This chapter explores the value of a service-learning unit within a pre-service secondary teaching course. It does so through the perceptions of pre-service teachers. The purpose was to determine the potential of a service-learning program to prepare pre-service secondary teachers for the classroom, both personally and professionally. The context for the research is a social justice service-learning unit offered to pre-service secondary teachers undertaking a Bachelor of Education, Master of Teaching or Graduate Diploma of Education. There were 105 participants in the study. Data collection entailed a 25- to 30-minute survey, which participants completed at the conclusion of the unit. The survey contained qualitative and quantitative questions. Data were analysed through content analysis in the case of the open-ended questions while percentages and frequency column graphs were used for the multiple response questions. The results revealed that the personal and professional development of pre-service secondary teachers had been impacted significantly as a result of engagement in service-learning activities. Additionally, participants listed a range of ‘memorable’ experiences, highlighted various challenges associated with service-learning, indicated ways service-learning prepared them for their teaching practicum, and noted the importance of including service-learning as part of a teaching degree. An over-arching theme that emerged repeatedly in the comments of the pre-service teachers was the need to adopt an inclusive attitude in their teaching practice. The chapter concludes with the authors offering recommendations that focus on further research into the viability of service-learning programs in pre-service teaching courses.

There are several factors which account for the inefficiencies observed in the educational system of a less developed country. Some of these factors, with particular reference to the educational system of Greece, are briefly mentioned in this paper. However, the main objective of the paper is to show how the application of goal programming could be of assistance to the educational administrators in the country with respect to determining: (1) how to allocate the available resources among the different subsystems of the educational system and among the different components within each subsystem; (2) the quality level of education that the country can afford; and (3) the financial sacrifices necessary for different levels of improvement.