Teacher Education Project Research Articles

TEACHERS’ COMPETENCE IN THE DOMAIN OF LEARNING FACILITY BASED ON EDUCATION FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Teachers are an important component in determining the learning process in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The second report of the teacher education project for ESD Asia – Pasific held on 17 th – 19 th September 2019 in Bangkok produced a competency framework for ESD teachers. This framework defines the competencies required by teachers to be involved in ESD which are implemented, developed, and evaluated by teacher education institutions. There are three domains in the teacher competency framework for ESD: facilitate learning, continue to learn and create, as well as connect, collaborate, and engage. However, this study only focused on one domain, which was learning facility. A total of 25 teachers from nine elementary schools provided their best answers based on the existing reality through a questionnaire distributed by the researchers about ESD-based teacher competence in the domain of lthe earning facility. This study aimed to determine the extent to which teachers understand and implement ESD-based competence in the domain of learning facilities in elementary schools. The data were processed with the rasch model through the winsteps application. The results of this study indicated that the teachers were able to implement it very well, but the idea was that the teachers still did not know that what they did led to ESD-based teachers' competence in the domain of learning facility.

Inservice teacher education in pandemic times

O Projeto de Monitorização, Acompanhamento e Investigação em Avaliação Pedagógica (Projeto MAIA) é um projeto de formação contínua de professores que se iniciou em setembro de 2019, para melhorar práticas de avaliação e ensino e as aprendizagens dos alunos. Após cerca de cinco meses, em plena pandemia, foi possível dar continuidade ao projeto. Apesar da pandemia e das dificuldades que criou, os resultados evidenciaram que as dimensões do projeto, o enquadramento teórico e conceitual e os processos e dinâmicas de formação utilizados parecem ter sido determinantes para alcançar os seus propósitos e o seu reconhecido e comprovado sucesso.

Survey Methods to Identify Risk of Attrition: Measures of Career Intention and Regret

The common measure of teacher retention as snapshots of those employed in state-funded schools may overestimate attrition by failing to consider a desire for flexibility in contemporary teaching careers. When used as a measure of the effectiveness of teacher education, an over-emphasis on classroom teacher supply may also narrow the curriculum to teacher training rather than the more expansive ‘learning teaching’. This paper discusses two ‘softer’ measures of retention, career intention and training regret, to give a more general sense of how contemporary teachers see their career development as relating to their initial teacher education and professional learning. These measures are generated by adapting survey questions from the OECD’s TALIS and the US’ Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Study, simply asking teachers where they see themselves in five years’ time and if they would still choose to become a teacher if they could go back to before they began training. Surveys were administered annually to two cohorts of recent graduates as part of the Measuring Quality in Initial Teacher Education project—three data captures for 2018 graduates, two for 2019 graduates. It is shown how these measures help to mitigate declines in survey response and can give some helpful estimates of teacher attrition with respect to sex, ethnicity, school type, and degree type. The alternative measures are also argued to give helpful indicators of attrition risk before it happens, allowing discussion of how teachers’ career intentions change during their early careers. In particular, it is found that leaving the classroom is a fairly common expectation, but not necessarily because of teacher burnout. It is suggested that asking what teachers can imagine themselves doing is an effective measure for engaging with issues around vocational choice and teaching as a lifelong profession, with implications for how careers in education are conceptualised in initial teacher education programmes.

Integrating design thinking into instructional design: The #OpenTeach case study

Online education is becoming the norm in higher education. Effective instructional design methods are required to ensure that “ever-connected” students’ needs are being met. One potential method is design thinking: an agile methodology that stresses the importance of empathy with the student. The #OpenTeach fully online course was designed using design thinking principles and delivered in Spring 2020. This article reports on a case study which focused on the use of design thinking to design and develop the #OpenTeach course. The five iterative stages of design thinking (empathy, define, ideate, prototype and test) were integrated into the design and development of the course materials. The findings of this study indicate that the use of the design thinking process may be used by instructional designers to achieve empathy with their learners, which will ensure learners successfully engage and achieve the learning objectives of the course.
 Implications for practice or policy:
 
 A rich case study of the successful integration of design thinking within the instructional design methodology of an online teacher education project is valuable to educationalists who wish to follow a user-cntred empathetic approach.
 Instructional designers should focus on empathising with their student cohort to successfully engage students in the content that has been designed, and developed, as part of an online course.

Unleashing Student's Perspectives on Novel Teacher Education Program

Bachelor in Education 4 years has been launched in the universities of Pakistan for the pre-service teacher training across Pakistan. This study was conducted to have the perception of students about the newly launched B.Ed 4 years program with the collaboration of the Teacher Education Project by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The enrolled students (n-40) of the B.Ed 4 year program were a sample of the study. An interview protocol was administered to have an insight into IUB students. Students' perception was taken in the form of their viewpoints right from the beginning like a reason for taking admission in this program, perception prevailing in their surrounding community about this newly launched degree and the university's role assessment in coming up to their expectations. NVIVO-11 was used for data analysis. It can be concluded that there are no doubts about the viability and marketability of the program in future.

Residência pedagógica: uma discussão epistemológica

O presente texto objetiva apresentar, de maneira ampla, elementos teóricos e metodológicos sobre a configuração da Residência Pedagógica numa perspectiva crítica emancipadora. O estudo se justifica a partir da compreensão de que a formação de professores tem se constituído, ao longo das últimas décadas, como uma importante pauta no contexto das políticas educacionais desenvolvidas em diferentes países. Por ser considerada como aspecto fundamental para a construção da qualidade na educação, importa-nos discutir a Residência Pedagógica como um dos elementos políticos e pedagógicos da formação que traduzem diferentes valores, princípios e projetos de sociedade. Para tanto, são apresentadas, inicialmente, discussões sobre formação de professores; seguidas da análise conceitual da Residência Pedagógica e a discussão de uma proposta crítica emancipadora. Este caminho, referenciado em estudos bibliográficos sobre a temática, proporcionou desvelar elementos presentes nos projetos de formação de professores que atravessaram historicamente o modo que estes se constituem no Brasil. Dialeticamente, buscou-se estabelecer o desenvolvimento do projeto de formação comprometido com a humanização e a emancipação dos sujeitos, numa perspectiva dialógica que reconhece a educação como uma prática social situada e que toma, como ponto de partida, os contextos de vivência dos sujeitos de forma a construir propostas prenhes de sentido e significado para quem delas participa.

Crafting a pedagogical third space in a transnational teacher education project

This study documented a month-long study abroad project in Oaxaca, Mexico during the summer of 2018 for twelve, K-12 pre-service and in-service educators from New Jersey, where they studied Spanish, literacy, and culturally responsive pedagogical practices. Using notions of third spaces as theory and pedagogy, the findings challenge and expand notions of US transnational teacher education and suggest that transnational teacher education may be particularly useful for facilitating third spaces for pre-service and in-service educators to confront inequitable practices and question their language and literacy ideologies and pedagogical practices.

Understanding teacher education within the scope of the Model of Semantic Fields

Background: In Mathematics Education many works use the Model of the Semantic Fields (MSF) to investigate aspects of the teaching and learning Mathematics and teacher education. However, none of these works analyzes the development of this theoretical model or investigates the theories that support it. Objectives: present a meta-analysis of the results of the doctoral thesis (Paulo, 2020) which aimed to investigate the existence of a Mathematics teacher education project consistent with the MSF. Design: The study is part of a hermeneutics analysis based on the MSF's ways of proceeding. Setting and Participants: The research has a bibliographic nature and was developed from 31 works published between the years 1992 and 2012. The selection of works that constituted the research corpus took place by consulting all works published by the research group Sigma-t, being elected those dealing with teacher education. Data collection and analysis: From the corpus of the research, an analysis was carried out according to the MSF's characteristic way of proceeding, explained in the item “Methodology” of this text. This analysis resulted in the production of a report from which the authors articulated their conclusions. Results: The study shows the existence of a teacher training project being articulated over the years by the researchers who make up the research group investigated. In a complementary way, a systematization of “Plausible Reading” also resulted from our analyzes as a research procedure based on the MSF. Conclusions: We conclude this article by pointing out the potential and limitations of the research developed during the PhD, as well as referrals for the research developed.

Role of Teacher Education in Preparing Teachers for Teaching in Religious Schools of Balochistan

A large number of children in Balochistan attend religious schools (Madrasas) that have been criticized for spreading extremist views in the society. Teacher education institutions play a vital role in bringing cultural and religious harmony by producing prospective teachers who are able to cultivate tolerance, acceptance, patriotism, ethnic, religious respect and counter extremism, sectarian, and discrimination prospective. This qualitative exploratory study explores whether the prospective teachers in Balochistan are trained enough to teach in religious schools. The data were collected through in-depth interviews and focused group discussions. All teacher educators and prospective teachers from the universities that remained part of Pre-STEP or Teacher Education Project (TEP) assisted by USAID constituted the population of the study. Sample was selected through purposive sampling from two universities situated in Quetta. 10 teacher educators (5+5) and 10 prospective teachers (5+5) were selected as sample for interviews while two groups of prospective teachers (5 participants in each) were selected from the both case universities for focus group interviews. Data were analyzed through thematic analysis. The findings indicated that the prospective teachers and teacher educators considered the recent teacher education programs in Balochistan not enough to train teachers to teach in religious schools.
 Keywords: Prospective Teachers; Religious Schools; Teacher Education Programs; Balochistan

O conhecimento de futuros professores sobre os processos de raciocínio matemático antes e depois de uma experiência de formação

This article is part of the Mathematical Reasoning and Teacher Education Project (REASON) which aims to study the mathematical and didactical knowledge that teachers need to carry out a practice that promotes students’ mathematical reasoning and to study ways to support their development, through a design research methodology. We propose to discuss the knowledge that future teachers have about mathematical reasoning and its processes, before and after a teacher education methods course. To achieve this goal, we analyzed data related to reasoning processes present in two questions of a task, used as a pre-test and post-test, and applied in a class of 1st year of the Master of Teaching in the 1st Cycle of Basic Education and Maths and Science in the 2nd Cycle of Basic Education. The reasoning processes discussed in this article are generalizing, justifying, exemplifying and classifying. Quantitative analysis of the students’ responses was carried out, as well as content analysis of how they understand the reasoning processes. The results show that most students have an adequate knowledge about mathematical reasoning, as well as the reasoning processes analyzed, in the two moments of application of the task. There is greater clarity in explaining what they understand to be the reasoning processes, after the teacher education course.

Learning with environments: Developing an ecological psychology inspired relational pedagogy

ABSTRACT A disconnect from environments has largely dominated educational discourse and policy. Attention to place and environment in education has gained momentum recently through several relational theories. Application of these theories in education notes the materiality and relationality of pedagogy, though often without specificity as to what the pedagogy is – how it is enacted and what guides such pedagogy. For pedagogical direction in enlivening learning with environments, this paper looks to the potential of ecological psychology theories of affordances and developing specificity via perception and action with environments. To illustrate such, we offer reflections on the pedagogical gap from a teacher education project that attunes preservice teachers to the potential for learning by engaging with spaces produced for children by artists. We then look closely to the pedagogical practices of an artist working with children in a primary school maker space-oriented program. Inspired by ideas from ecological psychology, we identify four pedagogical principles in practices of responsive learning with environments and suggest these as a possible pedagogical framework for eliciting embodied, emplaced, relational, and integrated learning with environments.

A Longitudinal Evaluation of a Teacher Education Project: CLAC 20 Years Later

ABSTRACT Today, engaging in university extension programs is mandatory for undergraduate students in Humanities. However, before 2015, efforts in this area were rather scant and tended to concentrate on services and consultancy. Few were the projects, like CLAC (Language Courses for the Community), that aimed at preparing teachers for the realities of the classroom by means of a hands-on experience. To examine the influence this pioneer project may have on the academic, professional, and personal life of the participants, this paper reports a longitudinal study with 60 participants. Their answers to an online questionnaire indicate that the project reached its objectives in terms of promoting critical thinking and autonomy, and preparing well-qualified professionals. This assessment shows that this pioneering project is a model that should be replicated.

Approaches to researching digital-pedagogical competence development in VE-based teacher education

For the past two decades, Virtual Exchange (VE) has enjoyed increasing popularity in university education, including initial (language) teacher education programmes (O’Dowd, 2018). Collaborating online with colleagues and students from different cultural backgrounds and educational systems has allowed trainees to experience and reflect on issues related to technology and pedagogy in authentic linguistic and intercultural contexts. In 2017/2018, the Evaluating and Upscaling Telecollaborative Teacher Education (EVALUATE) project – an Erasmus+ funded European Policy Experimentation (EPE) – collected and analysed data from VEs across the curriculum involving over 1,000 participants at Initial Teacher Education (ITE) institutions in Europe and beyond.Here, we specifically focus on the impact of VE on their digital-pedagogical competence development. Following a mixed method design we used the Technological PedagogicalContent Knowledge (TPACK) work of Mishra and Koehler (2006) and Schmidt et al. (2009) in a pre-post-test manner. These were complemented by qualitative content analysis of prompted diary entries at key stages during the exchanges to collect further evidence of existing and emerging digital-pedagogical skills among the trainees. Based on one case study of a German-Polish EVALUATE exchange we will exemplify the aforementioned research methods and associated challenges. We will illustrate the urgent need for initial and in-service teacher education that combines technology and pedagogy and argue for VE as an ideal context to this effect. Finally, we will demonstrate how the chosen research approach has contributed to providing the kind of evidence required by education administrators and policy makers for a systematic integration of VE into teacher education programmes.

Using Japanese Lesson Study to Merge Inservice Professional Development and Preservice Clinical Experiences

For many years, lesson study has been woven into the professional lives of Japanese teachers. Recently, it has become more widespread in the U.S. Core elements of Japanese Lesson Study include collaborative lesson design, empirical trials of lessons, collective analysis of empirical trials, and subsequent lesson re-design. We describe how these core elements were implemented in a teacher education project that brought together prospective and practicing secondary-level science and mathematics teachers in interdisciplinary groups facilitated by university faculty members. The four groups described in this report designed and analyzed lessons about attending to scale factor in the context of microscopic images, constructing a geologic timeline, examining states of matter, and building a scale model of the solar system. The Japanese Lesson Study process helped these groups reflect on the nature of the content being taught, pedagogical concerns, and content-specific pedagogy. We found that discursive moves such as connecting separate strands of conversation and identifying mistakes helped facilitate group reflection. A growing body of research suggests that Japanese Lesson Study can be implemented in a wide array of contexts; we encourage others to include it among clinical experiences for prospective teachers because of its potential to give more undergraduates access to the most skilled mentor teachers and to counteract feelings of professional isolation that cause many to leave teaching. We offer our own experiences facilitating lesson study and dealing with challenges along the way to help others start to implement the model in their own professional settings.

A new political economy of teacher development: England’s Teaching and Leadership Innovation Fund

ABSTRACT This article identifies new arrangements between the state and non-state actors in the public sector, one that extends current understandings of education privatisation, the transformation of public services ‘by substitution’ and, specifically theories of the ‘shadow state’. Drawing on data from the Political Economy of Teacher Education (PETE) project, the paper’s context is the current situation of post-qualification teacher development in England and its point of departure the Teaching and Leadership Innovation Fund (TLIF) initiative, in the wider context of Conservative political interests in promoting ‘social mobility’ through enhancing ‘teacher quality’. Through a political economy analysis of public records, course information, Freedom of Information (FOI) requests and interviews, the paper offers an emerging typology of enterprises to describe the organisations that won TLIF funding to provide Continuing Professional Development (CPD) for teachers in designated ‘Opportunity Areas’. Further, the paper extends available theorisations of the shadow state by identifying three kinds of shadow state structure – autonomous, intermediate and co-created – in relation to CPD provision under TLIF. This provisional identification is offered for critical examination beyond the immediate context of English CPD policy. The paper argues that these different relations of power and interdependence represent a new political economy of teacher development in England.

Accuracy of Elementary Teachers’ Representations of the Projects and Processes of Engineering: Results of a Professional Development Program

ABSTRACTWith the growing adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards across the United States, elementary teachers are being called upon to incorporate engineering into their science instruction, creating a need for ways to help elementary teachers better understand what engineering is and how to accurately communicate it to students. The present study examines the effects of a teacher education and professional development project in which elementary student teachers and their cooperating teachers were teamed with engineering graduate students to incorporate engineering into grades 3–5 classrooms. By working alongside experts in engineering for a 16-week semester, the project aimed to help participating elementary teachers better understand what engineering is and what engineers do. To assess teachers’ conceptions of engineering, we administered the Draw-An-Engineer Test as pretest and posttest. An important contribution of the present study is our development of a novel approach to analyzing responses from that instrument that is appropriate for adult populations and that also addresses multiple known shortcomings of drawing tasks. We found that from pretest to posttest, teachers’ responses became clearer with respect to the processes that engineers use in their work, and they became more likely to represent flowchart models of “the engineering design process.” The teachers’ focus on process, however, was not shared by the engineers, indicating that the engineers were not simply conveying their own understanding of engineering to the teachers. Rather, the teachers constructed their own understanding of engineering work that deviated in certain ways from the views of the engineers.

Pre-service Primary Teachers’ Mathematical Content Knowledge: An Exploratory Study

The Primary Teacher Education (PrimTEd) project was established in response to concerns about the pre-service preparation of primary teachers in South Africa. In order to inform the development of appropriate pre-service mathematics courses, an initial need in the PrimTEd project was to establish the nature of the mathematical knowledge of pre-service teachers both near the start and also near the end of their studies, through an online assessment. This paper describes the design of this PrimTEd online mathematics test and reports on the performance on the test of first-year and fourth-year primary mathematics student teachers, at three different universities. The overall performance of students together with the small differences between first and fourth year student performance indicate a need for student teachers to revisit primary school mathematics in a way that provides a deep understanding of key mathematical concepts in order to be better prepared for future teaching careers.

What Students Learn from Engineering Instruction: Perspectives from Elementary Teachers

ABSTRACTEngineering design activities are a common way for teachers to incorporate engineering into their science classrooms, as called for by current science policy documents in the United States. However, little is known about how teachers prioritize different learning objectives during engineering design lessons. Understanding teachers’ thinking on this subject is important for teacher educators because teachers’ beliefs about learning goals influence their teaching practices. This study presents elementary teachers’ views on what their students learned during engineering instruction, most of which was in the form of design activities, over the course of a semester. The teachers were participants in a teacher education and professional development project aimed at supporting elementary science and engineering instruction. The results indicate that most teachers described student learning in terms of developing design skills and practices, whereas very few discussed their students’ learning of engineering concepts. Interestingly, teachers also frequently discussed students’ learning of the nature of engineering, suggesting that they highly prioritized this outcome.

Humanising as innovation in a cold climate of [so-called-evidence-based] teacher education

ABSTRACTThis article argues for the humanisation of research evidence through narrative as an urgent project in teacher education and development. Narrative has the potential to make a significant contribution to a critical re-definition of both evidence and innovation in teacher education. But this argument is not a call for a user-friendly (re)packaging of research evidence, so that ‘what works’ can be diffused throughout the profession. Globally, such efficiency and productivity approaches have merely sedimented established inequities and injustices. By humanising, the paper promotes a recognition that research evidence of value, is steeped in rich provenance, being both borne out of, and brought to bear in, complex and diverse contexts that are mediated by, and impact upon, the unpredictable yet meaningful activities of humans. It is argued that using evidence effectively is predicated on intelligent judgment and interpretation in and on action, processes that require moral deliberation as well as pedagogical and technical innovation. The central role of narrative in this endeavour is explored critically.

Reconceptualised family resemblance approach to nature of science in pre-service science teacher education

ABSTRACTA recent framework on nature of science (NOS) is the Family Resemblance Approach (FRA). FRA presents NOS as a cognitive-epistemic and social-institutional system with a set of categories: aims and values, scientific methods, scientific practices, scientific knowledge and social-institutional aspects of science. Although FRA has been problematised philosophically and its implications for science education have been considered by science educators, its empirical adaptations in science education are limited. In order to illustrate the educational adaptations of FRA, we refer to Reconceptualised Family Resemblance Approach to Nature of Science or RFN. We present a study based on a funded pre-service science teacher education project whose aim was to design, implement and evaluate the impact of RFN strategies. Fifteen pre-service teachers participated in a 14-week teacher education intervention that infused RFN. A 70-item questionnaire was designed to investigate the outcomes of the teacher education intervention. Individual interviews with pre-service teachers were also conducted. Quantitative and qualitative data analysis suggest that the teacher education intervention had an overall significant impact on pre-service teachers’ views of NOS. The paper contributes to the understanding of how NOS can be incorporated in science teacher education using a new orientation to NOS based on FRA.