Teacher Education Providers Research Articles

Student teacher timeline: a tool for capturing early childhood teacher candidate well-being

Teacher education faculty have used a variety of methods (e.g. exit interviews, questionnaires) to capture early childhood education teacher candidates’ experiences as student teachers. Most often the focus is on the professional details of student teaching without attending to the personal aspects that impact teacher well-being and performance. This study examined the development and use of a Student Teacher Timeline tool to visually represent critical professional and personal events during the student teaching experience. Results indicate that this tool, unlike exit interviews, is easily administered, captures both the personal and professional aspects of student teaching, and facilitates understanding the impact of these events on professional and personal well-being. In addition, it can provide teacher educators with information to better support teacher candidates during their final field experience.

‘Don’t do anything special for us coming’: the mental health impact of Ofsted inspections on teacher educators in England

ABSTRACT Ofsted inspections of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) providers aim to enhance training quality for pre-service teachers in England. However, research rarely examines the impact of these inspections on the wellbeing of Teacher Educators (TEs) based in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This study, part of a broader investigation into burnout among HEI-based TEs in Ireland and the UK, focuses on the English context, where the inspection practices of Ofsted have been identified as significant stressors. Drawing on data from the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI), open-ended survey questions and interviews, this study provides preliminary insights into the mental health effects of Ofsted inspections on TEs. It reveals that inspection processes contribute to anticipatory stress, increased workload, and performative pressures, negatively impacting TEs’ professional morale and wellbeing. The paper recommends reforms such as predictable inspection schedules, streamlined documentation, and dedicated mental health support for TEs during the inspection period.

Producing the shadow curriculum: an evaluation of recent changes to initial teacher education in England

ABSTRACT Recent government accreditation of initial teacher education provision in England has resulted in a deep sense of unrest within the sector. Along with an intensely regulated accreditation process embodied in the Initial Teacher Training (ITT) Market Review, a revised framework, known as the Core Content Framework (CCF) has been introduced. This paper provides an analysis of the CCF, bringing together Foucauldian discourse analysis and a new emerging methodology, doppelganger as method. This approach explores situations of conflict, asking where a double or doppelganger emerges and how it functions as a technology of power. It finds that the conflicting demands of the CCF and the quality benchmarks that regulate university provision produce a dual curriculum. An authorised curriculum is established by the CCF, while a shadow curriculum emerges from the aspects of curriculum which are rendered invisible in the framework. I find that the CCF represents an attack on teacher educator professionalism as it removes the autonomy of the educator to choose their own content, pedagogy and key texts. Resistance to this regulation, however, emerges from more holistic ideologies and can be found hidden within classroom interactions and practices.

Negotiating discourses of special education teacher identity: preservice special education teachers’ identity (re)construction during practicum

ABSTRACT The shortage of special education teachers globally has created the need to understand how this group views itself, especially at the preservice stage. Understanding special education teachers’ identity construction could assist in providing teacher education that attracts and retains more special education teachers. However, little attention has been paid to preservice special education teachers’ (PSETs) identity formation. Utilising Gee’s discursive approach to identity within an interpretive qualitive paradigm, this multiple case study collected rich data via semi-structured individual interviews and weekly reflective writing from 10 PSETs in China over four months of school-based practicum. Analysis of data showed that the participants (re)constructed the Discourse of being special education teachers in and through enacting the four sub-Discourses of advocate, teacher, professional and learner. Drawing on the findings, it is argued that PSETs’ identity (re)construction during practicum involved continuous negotiation between their practicum experiences, their own personal discourses and dominant social discourses about special education teachers. Implications for policy and practice are discussed regarding improving specialist teacher preparation programmes and raising special education teachers’ social status.

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.

Validation of Preservice School-Based Agricultural Education Teacher Dispositions

Effective teaching encapsulates professional, interpersonal, and intrapersonal knowledge. Likewise, dispositions influence educators’ understanding of when and how to utilize knowledge and skills, especially in the context of their particular classrooms. While dispositions are a crucial piece of educator preparation program accreditation, neither InTASC nor CAEP provides a guide on which dispositions should be assessed. Without a valid and reliable instrument for SBAE educator preparation programs and limited research, further investigation is needed to provide teacher educators with tools to measure and implement dispositions to increase the growth of preservice agriculture teachers. This study was informed by the human capital theory, allowing the researchers to validate a list of preservice SBAE teacher dispositions through a principal component analysis (PCA). The PCA fit to five components which resulted in 18 of the 28 items loading above a 0.6, accounting for 59.6% of the explained variance and resulted in an overall Cronbach’s alpha of 0.98. The resulting components included Empathetic and Considerate, Directed, Engaged and Attentive, Personal Integrity, and Emotional Maturity. To accomplish the essential human capital growth during the teacher preparation program and clinical teaching experience, modeling the components is pivotal in furthering the professional dispositions of SBAE teacher aspirants.

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.

Understanding and utilising the interplay between two frameworks relating to teacher professional development: a case study

Abstract In England, there has been a teacher recruitment and retention crisis for many years. In such a crisis, it is important that initial teacher education (ITE) providers are able to identify, recruit and educate ‘high quality’ applicants to join the teaching profession. In this study, we focused on two case studies of beginning teachers who were enrolled in a University-School ITE Partnership. By listening to these two novice teachers, and analysing their experiences against two frameworks of professional development (the professional learning continuum of Wilson & Demetriou (2007) and the characteristics of effective teachers identified by Korthagen & Wubbels (2001)), we explain how a synthesis of the frameworks could help ITE providers to select, monitor and assess beginning teachers’ developmental trajectory when learning to teach.

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.