This article reports on the results of a research project in which 18 teacher educators in three countries - Australia, The Netherlands, and United Kingdom - were interviewed about their experiences ...of working in the so-called 'third space' between schools and universities, particularly in relation to the practicum, or field supervision. Most teacher educators have previously worked as teachers in schools or other educational settings, and when they become teacher educators in universities, they are often involved in the supervision or mentoring of preservice teachers in the field. The research reported in this article examined how university-based teacher educators manage the challenges inherent in working with mentor/cooperating teachers after having been or when still practicing as teachers in schools. Findings from the study showed that for teacher educators, working in the third space involves managing shifting identities between teacher and teacher educator, responding to changing perspectives on learning and teaching, and negotiating sometimes finely balanced and difficult relationships. Author abstract
Issues of teacher quality and effectivity inform teacher education, policy, practice and research and are connected with teacher resilience and retention. (Mansfield, C.F., S. Beltman, A. Price and ...A. McConney. 2012. "Don't sweat the small stuff:" Understanding teacher resilience at the chalkface. Teaching and Teacher Education 28, no. 3: 357-367). Effective teachers are strongly associated with resilient teachers, those who possess particular personality traits and maintain their commitment to the job despite the challenges they face (Gu, Q. and C Day. 2007. Teachers resilience: A necessary condition for effectiveness. Teaching and Teacher Education 23, no. 8: 1302-1316). This paper examines teachers' views on the propensities of effective English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers and on the factors that contributed to their teacher preparation. Data was collected using a self-report online survey from 167 early career English teachers and in-depth interviews with a sample of six teachers. Results point at personal 'soft factors' such as motivation, enthusiasm and self-confidence coupled with school support, team work and shared teaching practices, seen as most cardinal in English teachers' effectivity and resilience. Programmes nurturing emotional management, self- awareness and ways of improving self-regulation are suggested both in pre-service preparation programmes and in-service professional development, in order to sustain teacher motivation and commitment.
We analyze a particular pedagogy for learning to interact productively with students and subject matter, which we call “rehearsal.” Our goal is to specify a way in which teacher educators (TEs) and ...novice teachers (NTs) can interact around teaching that is both embedded in practice and amenable to analysis. We address two main research questions: (a) What do TEs and NTs do together during the kind of rehearsals we have developed to prepare novices for the complex, interactive work of teaching? and (b) Where, in what they do, are there opportunities for NTs to learn to enact the principles, practices, and knowledge entailed in ambitious teaching? We detail what happens in rehearsals using quantitative and qualitative methods. We begin with the results of our quantitative analyses to characterize how typical rehearsals were structured and what was worked on. We then show how NTs and TEs worked together to enable novices to study principled practice through qualitative analyses of a particularly salient aspect of ambitious teaching, namely, eliciting and responding to students’ performance.
This study aims at investigating the profiles of teacher educators in order to explore their ability to prepare preservice teachers for technology integration in education. Specifically, the current ...study examines whether teacher educators can be grouped on the basis of their attitudes toward ICT (in education), their ICT self‐efficacy to design ICT‐rich learning environments, their competencies to use ICT in their teaching practice and the strategies they use to prepare preservice teachers for technology integration. These strategies are included in the SQD (Synthesis of Qualitative Data) model and comprise: (1) teacher educators as role models, (2) reflecting on the role of technology in education, (3) learning how to use technology by design, (4) collaboration with peers, (5) scaffolding authentic technology experiences and (6) providing continuous feedback. Data were collected from a sample of 284 teacher educators in Flanders, the Dutch‐speaking part of Belgium, and submitted to latent profile analysis. The added value of the current study lies in the account of how SQD strategies and a typical set of determinants of ICT integration can be associated within teacher educators’ profile. Based on the profiles emerging from this study, teacher training institutions should consider their teacher educators to be gatekeepers when preparing future generations of teachers for the learning environments of the twenty‐first century. In the discussion section, the implications for practice and future research are discussed.
The research in this Special Issue is an international collection of studies focusing on the current challenges and possibilities in teacher education. The contributors examine teacher education with ...theoretical and empirical approaches including both qualitative and quantitative research methods. The studies demonstrate that future teachers need high-level ethical and pedagogical skills to cope with the new challenges in education. With a research-based and holistic approach, we can educate good teachers for tomorrow's schools. Contributors to this collection of eleven articles reflect global issues in teacher education originating from Australia, Estonia, Finland, England, Portugal, and Sweden.
The purpose of this study was partly to test the factor structure of a recently developed Norwegian scale for measuring teacher self-efficacy and partly to explore relations between teachers' ...perception of the school context, teacher self-efficacy, collective teacher efficacy, teacher burnout, teacher job satisfaction, and teachers' beliefs that factors external to teaching puts limitations to what they can accomplish. Participants were 2249 Norwegian teachers in elementary school and middle school. The data were analyzed by means of structural equation modelling using the AMOS 7 program. Teacher self-efficacy, collective efficacy and two dimensions of burnout were differently related both to school context variables and to teacher job satisfaction.
Talking about education Biesta, Gerda; Priestley, Mark; Robinson, Sarah
Journal of curriculum studies,
01/2017, Letnik:
49, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The interest in teachers' discourses and vocabularies has for a long time been studied under the rubric of knowledge, most notably teachers' professional knowledge. This interest can be traced back ...to Shulman's distinction between different kinds of teacher knowledge and Schwab's interest in the role of practical reasoning and judgement in teaching. Within the research, a distinction can be found between a more narrow approach that focuses on teachers' propositional or theoretical knowledge and a more encompassing approach in which teachers' knowledge is not only the knowledge for teachers generated elsewhere, but also the knowledge of teachers. This is the 'stock of knowledge' gained from a range of sources and experiences, including teachers' ongoing engagement with the practice of teaching itself. In this paper, we focus on the role of teachers' talk in their achievement of agency. We explore how, in what way and to what extent such talk helps or hinders teachers in exerting control over and giving direction to their everyday practices, bearing in mind that such practices are not just the outcome of teachers' judgements and actions, but are also shaped by the structures and cultures within which teachers work.
As in many countries worldwide, as part of the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown schools in Germany closed in March 2020 and only partially re-opened in May. Teachers were confronted ...with the need to adapt to online teaching. This paper presents the results of a survey of early career teachers conducted in May and June 2020. First, we analysed the extent to which they maintained social contact with students and mastered core teaching challenges. Second, we analysed potential factors (school computer technology, teacher competence such as their technological pedagogical knowledge, and teacher education learning opportunities pertaining to digital teaching and learning). Findings from regression analyses show that information and communication technologies (ICT) tools, particularly digital teacher competence and teacher education opportunities to learn digital competence, are instrumental in adapting to online teaching during COVID-19 school closures. Implications are discussed for the field of teacher education and the adoption of ICT by teachers.
In this paper, we focus on questions around who we are as teacher educators as well as our responsibilities in helping pre-service teachers compose forward-looking stories as they prepare to begin ...teaching. We draw on the results of two studies in this paper: one a semi-structured interview study with 55 second- and third-year teachers in two Canadian provinces and one narrative inquiry into the experiences of early career teacher leavers. These studies showed how early career teachers' stories to live by fuel their desires to become teachers. Teaching was a way to try to live out and sustain their stories to live by, that is, participants continued to live out their stories to live by shaped in early personal knowledge landscapes and embodied in their personal practical knowledge. We also learned that when teachers could not sustain their stories in the professional knowledge landscapes, their stories to live by shifted to stories to leave by, and they left teaching.
This paper reports on a study investigating the mindsets of 51 pre-service teachers at an Austrian university using Q methodology. Despite the recent growth in interest in the concept of mindsets, ...little research has addressed the mindsets of teachers – most of it focusing on the mindsets of learners – and the research that does investigate teachers tends to focus on beliefs about learning or intelligence. This study offers a new perspective by focusing on teachers’ beliefs about their own teaching competences. A further aim of the study is to expand the methodological repertoire in language education researchers. This study considers the potential of Q methodology, a research approach used widely in social sciences and education, but, as yet, rare in this field. The data indicate that the most common mindset among the pre-service teachers is one based around a strong belief in the learnability of the more technical aspects of teaching, while interpersonal skills tend to be regarded as more of a natural talent fixed within the individual. One practical implication of this finding is that teacher education programmes may need to pay more attention to explicitly developing the interpersonal side of teaching. A further finding was that teacher mindsets are constructed through individuals’ management of various sets of implicit theories and tend not to conform to the established dichotomous model of mindsets.
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