Content, Professional Preparation, and Teaching Methods: How Diverse Is Teacher Education across Countries?

Abstract

A teacher education program offers opportunities to learn (OTL) consistent with its vision of what teachers need to know and be able to do. The “Teacher Education and Development Study: Learning to Teach Mathematics” of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement provides, for the first time, the possibility to examine the diversity of OTL across countries. A latent class analysis reveals that it was sufficient to group the 8,000 future teachers from 15 countries into four classes to describe their OTL with respect to the content delivered, their professional preparation and the teaching methods experienced. Such commonality indicates more homogeneity than usually discussed in the comparative literature. This result may be, in turn, an indicator of an inherent logic of mathematics teaching.