Teacher Education Providers Research Articles

Understanding and improving teachers’ research engagement: Insights from success stories in Poland and Spain

Drawing on a qualitative, interview-based study of 36 research-engaged teachers in Poland and Spain, this paper aims to identify and explore the types of their research engagement, and their recommendations on how education stakeholders can improve this engagement. The findings reveal three types of teacher research engagement – i.e. situational engagement, emotional engagement, and transformative engagement – as well as specific roles and responsibilities for five stakeholders they view as being key to improving teacher research engagement: school leaders, teachers, university communities, teacher education providers, and policy makers. The paper concludes with new insights for theory and practice in this field.

A European experiment in governing teacher education and training: the case of the Erasmus+ Teacher academies

ABSTRACT This exploratory paper contributes to the literature on European Union (EU) soft governance by discussing the recent EU policy initiative “Erasmus+ Teacher Academies” as a case of experimentalist governance. Asking what makes this initiative a case of experimentalist governance, the paper demonstrates how it constitutes an experiment in terms of governance as well as the development of teaching and learning. In particular, we identify and discuss the properties of the initiative regarding the four key tenets of experimentalist governance: i) setting of common framework goals related to the European Education Area; ii) delegation of responsibility to networks, comprising initial teacher education and professional development providers, schools, government units, and other types of organisations, in finding ways to meet framework goals; iii) regular reporting and peer review, orchestrated by the European Commission; and iv) periodical re-evaluation of framework goals, measures and methods by a widening array of stakeholders. Considering the conditions for governing teacher education and training in the EU context, we discuss the perspectives for policy learning generated by the Academies, the “shadow of hierarchy” potentially giving direction to the initiative, and the ambition to include the teaching profession in EU policy-making.

메타버스를 활용한 역사과 교사교육의 가능성과 한계

Purpose: This study aims to explore the characteristics when pre-service teachers in teacher training programs develop and demonstrate micro-teaching history lesson modules using the metaverse, and examines the impact of metaverse development and utilization experiences on micro-teaching.
 Methods: Specifically, pre-service teachers participated in acquiring skills to utilize metaverse platforms, digitally reenacting the past, and in the development and application of micro-teaching programs. Instructors conducted university lectures on this subject, and participant surveys were carried out to assess the process.
 Results: The research results showed that pre-service teachers who participated in a course on teaching methodology using the metaverse were able to overcome their fear of online platforms by engaging in the process of understanding history recreated in virtual spaces and improving their lesson demonstration skills through online micro-teaching. They were able to conduct lesson demonstrations that included feedback considering student responses in virtual class scenarios, overcoming the constraints of time and space. By producing and applying historical education content in the metaverse for lesson demonstrations, they could establish a foundation for developing online teaching and learning materials for their students.
 Conclusion: In the era of AI digital education, it is necessary not only to develop and distribute metaverse platforms but also to provide teacher education that enhances the ability of pre-service teachers to utilize this digital literacy in their teaching.

Changes in teacher education provision: comparative experiences internationally

ABSTRACT Many changes have taken place in initial teacher education (ITE) programmes over the last number of years in countries such as Israel, Portugal, Jamaica, Ontario (Canada), and England. This paper outlines some of these changes, why they occurred, and to the extent possible, how effective these changes have been from the experience of the teacher educators who have written this paper. In particular, they describe one significant change that would greatly improve ITE in their respective jurisdictions. In the latter part of the paper, the writers discuss current trends and possible directions for teacher education across international contexts. With its contrasting accounts of ITE in different national contexts across the world, this article argues for high quality initial teacher education to provide a global educational workforce in which teachers and learners can flourish within an equal, yet diverse and decolonialised ecosystem.

Re-envisioning pre-service teachers’ beliefs and feelings about assessment: the important space of authentic assignments

ABSTRACT In early 2020, Initial Teacher Education providers were forced to reimagine many long-established practices due to pandemic restrictions. One post-primary concurrent Initial Teacher Education programme in the Republic of Ireland responded by conceptualising and developing an initiative to engage pre-service teachers in an authentic assessment task through the preparation of a classroom-based assessment from the perspective of the pupil. They then engaged in peer review and peer feedback on these classroom-based assessments and partook in a Subject Learning and Assessment Review meeting. This required the professional development of assessment literacies on the part of pre-service teachers, as well as disturbing their personal assessment beliefs at a cognitive and affective level. This paper finds that the collaborative assignment experience challenged pre-service teachers’ previous conceptions about the purposes of assessment while providing them with insight and preparation for formative assessment processes in use throughout Irish post-primary schools.

Examining assessment principles and practices within the online components of an initial teacher education programme in Aotearoa New Zealand

Learning and assessment that drives learner success should be a key tenet of all initial teacher education programmes. Initial teacher education providers in Aotearoa New Zealand must use an assessment framework to ensure that graduating teachers meet the Teaching Council standards. As a part of a review of their assessment practices, academic staff at an education institution conducted a survey to learn more about the practices and experiences of online assessment among their students and lecturers. It became apparent that, despite the large body of literature outlining the principles of good assessment, the range of assessment practices for online learning were not always being used or understood by students and lecturers. The findings highlighted that there is a wide variation in assessment practices between lecturers, and some students found tasks and feedback did not enhance their learning. From this we argue that closer attention be given to ensuring a wide range of assessment tasks are used, feedback practices are focused on improving student learning, and, most importantly, learner agency is upheld.

Assessing primary school preservice teachers’ confidence to apply their TPACK in specific categories of technologies using a self-audit survey

Internationally, university teacher educators have acted on the requirement that practising teachers need to be operational users of technologies. In response, coursework has been restructured to develop preservice teachers’ (PSTs) use and application of educational technologies for teaching and learning purposes. This paper presents the development and use of a self-audit survey designed to guide primary school PSTs’ self-directed learning and assessments in 10 specific categories of technologies, and to improve their confidence to apply their knowledge. The survey was administered to 296 PSTs in a pre- and post-course design and validated post hoc with Rasch analysis. Pre- and post-course comparison of responses showed significant increases in the PSTs’ self-assessed confidence in their abilities across all ability categories with medium to large effect sizes (r = .42–.82). The survey had utility, providing each PST with a customised report with which to identify their technology learning needs; it also provided PSTs with the agency to be self-directed in their learning. The survey has the potential to provide teacher educators with fine-grained information regarding which technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) being currently taught can be adopted, adapted, or rejected to maximise PSTs’ TPACK development.

Bracing Ourselves: Embracing Policy Changes through a Long-Standing University–Schools Teacher Education Partnership in England

We articulate the principles behind our practices as teacher educators for an Initial Teacher Education (ITE) provider in South-West England working in partnership with local schools. We position them as ‘braces’ that enable us not only to withstand but ‘embrace’ the challenges of the current policy environment, which imposes braces of its own. All ITE providers in England must present their curriculum and teaching plans for approval by the Department for Education, one of many significant changes to ITE required in England over the last decade. Furthermore, for such plans to be approved they must assume a model of schooling based on knowledge acquisition in tension with not only our own motivations but also a broader (global) conversation among teacher educators critical of policy priorities for schooling and professional teacher formation that prioritise success in high-stakes tests and international league tables. The braces/principles emerge through articulating our collective understandings of and concerns with the policy braces. Our principles connect to the processes we feel confident are necessary aspects of ‘becoming’ teachers and can hold our Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) together, going forwards. The braces—becoming an informed educator; becoming an ethical actor; becoming a reflective practitioner—have a distinctive form of reflexivity at their heart and should apply to everyone across our partnership: us, as university-based teacher educators; school-based colleagues; and pre-service teachers. We offer our approach and the braces/principles we have developed to others also struggling to reconcile their own notions of good teacher education with national policy imperatives.

Internalization of Indigenous Knowledge in the Education Curriculum for Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)

Indigenous knowledge in Indonesia is very diverse, but some of it is threatened with extinction due to the impact of modernization on people's lifestyles. This research aims to find new methods of integrating indigenous knowledge into the curriculum for preparing prospective science teachers. The new method is targeted to become a reference for prospective science teacher education providers in Indonesia. The research uses mixed methods to find the impact of integrating indigenous knowledge in the curriculum for preparing prospective science teachers, according to the NGSS. The impact on prospective science teachers' profiles is the ability to integrate indigenous knowledge in preparing NGSS. The research targets were 15 heads of science education study programs from 15 different tertiary institutions and 20 prospective science teachers from three different study periods (one year, two years, and more than three years). The difference between study periods is considered because applying a curriculum integrating indigenous knowledge has only begun in the three classes used in this study. The research results found that the longer the study period, the more prospective teachers have the skills to integrate indigenous knowledge more clearly. The N-Gain test obtained a result of 0.5 (medium), meaning that the existing curriculum on the skills of applying science concepts to prospective science teachers about indigenous knowledge is in the medium category. Systematic integration of the curriculum for preparing prospective science teachers makes NGSS and indigenous knowledge in academic texts, courses, teaching materials, and final projects for graduation requirements.

Reflections on Distance in Remote Placement Supervision: Bodies, Power, and Negative Education

School placement plays a critical and complex role in the professional development of student teachers. When universities and schools shut their doors and moved all teaching activities online in March 2020, initial teacher education (ITE) providers across Ireland had to implement emergency alternative practicum supports in order to ensure that students could complete their ITE programmes. Many initial teacher education providers across Ireland introduced professional online conversations as an alternative approach to professional practice supervision. It is easy to view this response to the COVID-19 crisis in purely deficit terms. For obvious reasons, no sensible teacher educator would advocate for abandoning school visits and replacing them with online professional conversations. Nonetheless, emergency measures arguably brought about affordances to the delivery of teacher education, which are deserving of consideration and may help to inform future practice. In this paper, we draw on our recent experience of ITE emergency practicum supervision to explore assumptions and tensions inherent in traditional teacher education practices. We reflect on how we enacted and experienced professional student–tutor conversations without the normally preceding classroom observations and interrogate normalised assumptions about the value and purpose of classroom observation. Our reflections are infused with ideas gleaned from philosophy and sociological theory and are underpinned by a theoretical formulation which we call “negative education”. “Negative education” refers to the learning that takes place as a consequence of deprivation. In these terms, we come to examine the negotiation of power and relationships in different learning environments. We explore the benefits of “zooming out”, to disseminate power, and show how this helps to engage with the broader aspects of teaching which are so easily overlooked by both tutors and students during “normal” school visits.

Living at Work: Teaching Online During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This article presents a case study of what educators from an initial teacher education provider in Aotearoa, New Zealand learnt from the collapse of institutional practice architecture during the COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020. It explores how educators responded to the challenges emerging from living at work and recognises the interconnected links of educators’ practices in their sayings, doings, and relatings. The study was conducted using semi-structured interviews to gather in the moment lived experiences of nine teacher educators in their ‘living at work’ context. The insight from these interviews provides a unique perspective of how educator and student wellbeing can be sustained through relationships. The collapse of institutional practice architecture highlighted arrangements and set-ups within the institute that enabled or constrained educator practices and how the changing arrangements impacted student wellbeing.

A Global Teacher Education Vision for the Prevention of Gender-Based Violence

This paper invites consideration of the role of global teacher education provision in developing global citizenship and social justice aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 5 and 10. It explores how global teacher education resources, with and for social justice, can influence knowledge, skills, attitudes and habits to support and strengthen initiatives for the prevention of gender-based violence. Through an autoethnographic research approach, the paper reflects on the extent to which an inclusive learning design, shared across different country contexts, can contribute to a process of empowered learning for the prevention of gender-based violence. The findings and results of this study suggest that inclusive learning design can enhance the process and practice of creating spaces for developing collaborative awareness and communities of practice to prevent gender-based violence through education.

Development and Validity of Teaching Communication Skills Questionnaires for Pre-Service Teachers (TCSQ-PST): A Confirmatory Factor Analysis

The function of teachers' communication abilities in imparting their knowledge to students is crucial. Failure to acquire these skills will lead to the collapse of the classroom learning process. Numerous studies address the need to develop communication skills, but few study how to quantify teaching communication skills to future vocational teachers. This study aims to create a questionnaire and perform a validity and reliability analysis using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). This study involved 175 students at universities providing teacher education programs in Jakarta, Indonesia. This study reveals that teaching communication skills for candidate vocational teachers can be measured using the Teaching Communication Skills questionnaires for pre-service teachers (TCSQ-PST). The total TCSQ-PST items are 23 items consisting of four conflict management items, four conversation skill items, four comforting items, three persuasion items, four referential skill items, and four narrative skills items. Based on validity and reliability testing, each of the 23 items explaining teaching communication skills to candidate vocational teachers is valid and reliable. This study's findings have significant implications for judging the achievement of teaching communication skills for future teachers.

Caveats for change: exploring pre-service teachers’ concerns regarding change

ABSTRACT Notable within the rhetoric of recent global reform trends is the (re)positioning of teachers from peripheral to critical stakeholders in educational change processes. Responding to this imperative, programmes of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) are now frequently tasked with promoting teacher agency as a core dimension of teaching. Yet, much evidence points to a persistent tension between renewed visions for teacher engagement and agency as part of global curriculum reform processes and the associated enactment of such visions. While teachers’ concerns related to individual reforms are increasingly detailed, less attention is paid to teachers’ views regarding change as a process. Premised on the conviction that better understanding and attention to teachers’ concerns related to change, holds the potential to support more authentic, impactful and sustainable reform developments, this paper explores the reflections of 53 Irish pre-service teachers on their openness to change and examines the caveats they attach to their engagement in and with change. Reflexive thematic analysis identified a range of caveats pre-service teachers attach to their engagement in and with change. Consideration of these caveats by policy makers and initial teacher education providers may support teachers to engage more deeply with change.

Towards Instrumental Trainability in England? The ‘Official Pedagogy’ Of The Core Content Framework

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the structure and substance of the Core Content Framework (CCF), a controversial document which stipulates content that providers of teacher education in England must incorporate in their programmes. We identify both a concept of instrumental trainability and a lack of coherence in the CCF which suggests it is unsuitable as a guide to a curriculum for teacher education. Drawing on Bernstein’s work and its application by other sociologists of educational knowledge, we identify how the CCF embeds a ‘generic mode’ in teacher education that has roots outside of disciplinary structures of knowledge production and therefore foregrounds a type of official pedagogy that sees teaching as a technical performance and leaves gaps in the knowledge and understanding a new teacher requires to make sound educational judgements. Employing Muller’s distinction between conceptual and contextual coherence, we argue that the CCF is based upon an imaginary notion of instructional practice that does not fully grasp the context of teachers’ work. We illustrate the argument via an analysis of the language, structure, and three of the eight sections in the CCF.

Quality Teacher Education in Punjab with the vision of the International Network of Teacher Education Institutes

Punjab is assisting the nation in achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education by putting the Asia-Pacific ESD Teacher Competency Framework into practice. A comparison of Punjab's public and private universities that provide teacher education is another goal of this research, as is determining how many of the different elements of ESD have been covered in the courses that make up the B.Ed. honors program. Along with a content study of the latter, the integration of the three domains of the Asia-Pacific ESD Teacher Competency Framework into the curriculum has also been sought. Several Punjabi institutions, both public and private, have incorporated the SDG curriculum into their teacher preparation programs.

Scientific and methodological support for preparing classroom teachers in modern education system: Evaluation of changes and opportunities

Introduction. The authors investigate the current trends in scientific and methodological support of preparing future teachers for moral education activities. The aim of the article is to identify changes in the leading characteristics of scientific and methodological support of classroom teachers’ preparation in modern conditions and to determine its prospects in the context of higher education transformation. Materials and Methods. The study is theoretical in nature, includes the analysis and generalization of theoretical approaches to scientific and methodological support of university teachers and empirical data obtained in the course of a comprehensive study of the content, forms and methods of preparing future teachers for conducting moral educational activities. The study is based on the following methodological approaches: psychological and educational support, scientific and methodological support, and the concept of involvement, allowing to reveal the successful areas and the main difficulties in scientific and methodological support of classroom teachers' training in academic and extracurricular activities, and to identify the prospects of scientific and methodological support in the context of the transformation of higher education. Results. The paper identifies the main areas of support: scientific and methodological support, student extracurricular involvement, research projects on classroom management problems, targeted information and methodological support. The study reveals the contradictions between teachers’ satisfaction with existing scientific and methodological support and dissatisfaction of students and heads of educational settings with the quality of classroom teachers’ preparation in modern schools. The authors identify the characteristic features of improving the quality of classroom management in modern schools. Conclusions. The study has shown the socio-pedagogical and professional significance of scientific and methodological support of classroom teachers' preparation in higher educational institutions that provide teacher education programmes. New methodological approaches to understanding the role and place of scientific and methodological support in higher education institution, innovative, network and interactive formats of training, and creating educational open professional-oriented environment serve as resources of scientific and methodological support of classroom teachers’ preparation.

DECOLONISATION OF PRE-SERVICE TEACHER EDUCATION CURRICULUM FOR EQUITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE IN HIGHER EDUCATION

The transition from apartheid to democracy came with high expectations for a speedy transformation. The education system in South Africa before 1994 was rooted in segregation and inequality among the social groups that exist in South Africa. Hence, the education system post-independence has endeavoured to provide not only physical access but also epistemological access to learning for all students. Therefore, the fundamental purpose of education is to provide an impartial and comprehensive curriculum. Pre-service teacher education is a critical component of higher education in any country. Thus, the provision of teacher education within institutions of higher learning is a crucial societal force capable of advancing a curriculum that is transformative and grounded in a framework of social justice. The objective of this research is to enhance the potential for decolonising pre-service teacher education to promote equity and inclusivity, utilising social justice. The curriculum in question revitalises social justice that prioritises the significance of the individual aspects of pedagogy, the politics of diversity, and the correlation between pedagogy and agency. The utilisation of literary voices in teacher education was deemed a valuable approach in examining the potential of social justice theory as coined by Rawls (1971), to contribute to a more inclusive and equitable teacher education curriculum, guided by transformative principles for pre-service teachers. A systematic literature review of various literature sources revealed that the integration of novel concepts and topics into teacher education is critical for transformation. The integration of indigenous knowledge, history, and languages into teaching and learning will critically engage students in knowledge, power, and being. Thus, the transformative curriculum through social justice will enhance parity and inclusiveness in the delivery of educational curricula. This research contributes to the discourse on the decolonisation process for higher education, which has long been predominantly framed in Eurocentric pedagogy in South Africa. Hence, an alternative viewpoint on pre-service teacher education curriculum calls for decolonisation using social justice theory.

Between a rock and a hard place: leading university teacher education in England

ABSTRACT Processes of market-making and regulation are recalibrating the work of teacher education. While an established body of research has examined changes to the content and control of teacher education in the UK and internationally, the impact of audit-based accountability on the work of academic leaders is neglected. This study explores the career transitions, experiences and commitments of leaders in professional education at a time of jurisdictional challenge. Drawing on interviews with Heads of Department of 10 large-scale university providers of pre-service teacher education in England, the analysis addresses the impact of multiple accountabilities on professional agency, identity and efficacy. The study finds participants’ need to demonstrate compliance with policy directives in a highly volatile operating context diminishes possibilities for critically reflexive leadership practice and policy activism.

Wither Pre-service Teacher Education in Zimbabwe? Object Lessons from Teacher Education Systems in the United Kingdom, United States and South Africa

After pragmatically tinkering with quantity-oriented models of teacher education since early 1980s, Zimbabwe now seems to be faced with quality challenges, necessitating change of policy direction. In recent years, disquiet has been voiced about the declining quality of school education, a trend widely attributed to the low quality of teachers. This has put teacher education provision in Zimbabwe in the spotlight of critical and in some instances derisive scrutiny. Under such circumstances, one would reasonably expect teacher education policy-makers to be diligently seized with change efforts. However, teacher education policy-makers seem to be dithering indecisively in relation to suggesting new directions for teacher education in Zimbabwe. This paper attempts to break the deafening silence in the teacher education policy community by suggesting some objects lessons for the teacher education system in Zimbabwe on the basis of insights derived from analyzing teacher education systems in the United Kingdom, United States and South Africa.