Psychology in Teacher Education

Abstract

Teachers should be empowered to act as deliberate professionals, i.e., guiding their actions in an adaptive way to the affordances of educational situations by carefully choosing purposes and goals, by ethical and cultural considerations, as well as by conceptual and technical knowledge. The core goal of teaching psychology in teacher education and vocational programs is to contribute to the education of such deliberate professionals. With theoretical and empirical insights in areas such as human learning, cognition, and motivation; personality and social development; testing and measurement; individual diversity, group differences, and special needs; research on social and cultural factors in instructional contexts; and classroom management, teachers’ professional development, and school effectiveness, educational psychology provides an important basis for the initial education of teachers. Yet, given the restricted time and space for psychology courses in initial teacher education, the curriculum and syllabus design for these programs poses several challenging issues, in particular how to deal with the trade-off between breadth and depth in covering scientific psychological insights and their various potential applications in teaching contexts.This chapter aims at providing international perspectives and insights into the core goals, as well as evidence-based practices and approaches of teaching psychology in teacher education programs. Starting with an introduction to the rationale for teaching psychology in teacher education programs, the chapter offers a summarizing overview of frameworks of professional teacher standards from all over the world, as well as recommendations for teaching psychology, and especially educational psychology, in teacher education programs. Next, core contents and topics of psychology for (pre-service) teachers are analyzed and presented based on a review of respective textbooks being used in countries around the world. Evidence-based instructional suggestions for implementing teaching, learning, and assessment are also provided. Finally, the relevance of psychology teaching in teacher education programs is emphasized, particularly with regard to transferring psychological knowledge and theories into educational practice and understanding psychological epistemology.KeywordsTeacher educationEducational psychologyTeaching standardsTeacher competencesEducational practiceTransferCompetence