Integrating the European portfolio in a competency-based teacher education approach

Abstract

1 IntroductionWe believe that the success or failure of classes depends very much on the teacher. We might manage without books or technological resources but not without competent teachers who know how to offer challenging tasks, motivating activities and encouraging learning situations. They often foster the desire to learn and do their best to satisfy students' expectations, needs and interests as well as to develop the skills, procedures, strategies and values that contribute to an integral education.But teachers' competence depends greatly on their preparation and personal characteristics. FL teachers' own learning experiences, the teaching models they experienced during their initial training, together with their personality usually have an important influence on their classroom performance and, consequently, on their students' results.The teaching models and techniques that teachers have studied and practised during their pre-service education have varied throughout the history of teacher education (see Madrid, 1996; McLaren and Madrid, 2005; Ortega and Madrid, 2006). At the present time the competency-based approach has been adopted in most education systems.2 New competency-based foreign language teacher educationThe competency-based movement has a long tradition. It became predominant in the seventies, and in the nineties, it was still being used in the British national vocational education qualification system which was concerned with the definition of adequate standards of competence and professional profiles for a world global economy. And from 2000 to 2003, the Organisation for Cooperation and Economic Development (OECD) developed its DeSeCo project (Definition and Selection of Competencies), and used the concept of competence in a more comprehensive way and with different connotations (Rychen and Salganik, 2001, 2003; Madrid and Hughes, 2013; Madrid, 2013). This project provided a new conceptual framework and identified some key competencies, core skills or basic capacities which helped to define the desirable goals of education systems and lifelong learning. Later on, the European Union and Spain in particular reformulated the school curricula around the concept of competence (although some authors have drawn a distinction between competency and competence, in this paper the two terms are used interchangeably).At present, competence is defined as the capacity to respond to complex demands and carry out a variety of tasks in an adequate manner. It entails a combination of practical skills, knowledge, motivation, ethical values, attitudes, emotions, social and behavioural operations that are activated in order to attain the successful outcome of an enterprise (see Perez, 2007: 10). For the technological and behaviourist competence-based teacher education movement (CBTE), the idea of teacher education based on competencies is more reductionist, atomized and lineal. The three basic and predominant elements of training were knowledge, performance and outcome (Arends, Masia and Weber, 1971) and the behavioural interpretation of training considers competencies as operational and observable actions that have little connection with underlying mental processes. It gives little importance to the interactive and complex nature of tasks and ignores the mental operations that underlie behaviour, intentions, and actions. In addition, it does not take into account the significance of contextual factors, and the effects of interpersonal aspects. Behavioural objectives are set up, developed in the classroom and assessed from a perspective which is external to the individual concerned. Teachers mainly check to what extent operational and instructional objectives have been achieved by learners (Madrid and Hughes, 2013; Madrid, 2013).However, the present view is that competencies must be developed and evaluated from an internal perspective and from the subjects' points of view. …