How teachers and teacher training are changing

Abstract

While the 20th century school focused on teaching, the 21st century school may well focus on learning. The role of teachers is changing to reflect this trend, and consequently teacher training processes are also changing. Teachers are becoming managers and facilitators of learning. To enhance children’s learning, they design, adapt, manage and evaluate learning environments. These functions require competencies pertaining to three domains and their interrelationships: pedagogy, subject area and ICT. As far as the relationships among these domains are concerned, teachers should be aware of the changes brought about in the their subject area by the introduction of ICT. They should know how the didactics of their specific subject area are evolving and what new ways of learning are being opened up by ICT. To construct these new competencies, new teacher training processes, environments and policies are required. This paper describes a collaborative online learning environment for teacher training. It is shown how online education can be used to train teachers to create a learning community of European teachers. Researchers have developed “Medea”, an online teacher training course in environmental education developed and run in the context of both a national programme and the European project “T3: Telematics for Teacher Training”.KeywordsTeacher trainingonline educationeducational policies