This open access book is the first account of the whole diversity of teacher education in the Nordic region: Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, the Åland Islands ...and Sápmi (where the Sámi people live). Today, large parts of the world are looking to the Nordic model of social organization, and interest in the Nordic comprehensive school system and teacher education arrangements is no exception. A good education is a key to prosperity and well-being. And the quality of students’ education is undoubtedly linked to the quality of their teachers’ education. While teacher education in the Nordic region is globally admired, it also faces new challenges. The leading scholars writing in this volume discuss the challenges and opportunities that professional environments are facing. By providing solid portraits of each area as well as analyses across the region, this book will be a great resource to students, academics in teacher education and schooling as well as social scientists and policy-makers inside and outside the Nordic region. This is an open access book.
Teacher education programs typically teach novices about one part of teaching at a time. We might offer courses on different topics—cultural foundations, learning theory, or classroom management—or ...we may parse teaching practice itself into a set of discrete techniques, such as core teaching practices, that can be taught individually. Missing from our courses is attention to the ultimate purpose of these discrete parts—how specific concepts can help teachers achieve their goals, or how specific procedures can help them achieve their goals. Because we are now shifting from a focus on bodies of knowledge to a focus on depictions of practice, this article examines our efforts to parse teaching practice into lists of discrete procedures. It argues that we need to pay less attention to the visible behaviors of teaching and more attention to the purposes that are served by those behaviors. As a way to begin a conversation about parsing teachers’ purposes, I offer a proposal for conceptualizing teaching as a practice that entails five persistent problems, each of which presents a difficult challenge to teachers, and all of which compete for teachers’ attention. Viewed in this way, the role of teacher education is not to offer solutions to these problems, but instead to help novices learn to analyze these problems and to evaluate alternative courses of action for how well they address these problems.
Currently, the field of teacher education is undergoing a major shift—a turn away from a predominant focus on specifying the necessary knowledge for teaching toward specifying teaching practices that ...entail knowledge and doing. In this article, the authors suggest that current work on K-12 core teaching practices has the potential to shift teacher education toward the practice of teaching. However, the authors argue that to realize this vision we must reimagine not only the curriculum for learning to teach but also the pedagogy of teacher education. We present one example of what we mean by reimagined teacher education pedagogy by offering a framework through which to conceptualize the preparation of teachers organized around core practices. From our perspectives, this framework could be the backbone of a larger research and development agenda aimed at engaging teachers and teacher educators in systematic knowledge generation regarding ambitious teaching and teacher education pedagogy. We conclude with an invitation to the field to join with us in imagining approaches to generating and aggregating knowledge about teaching and the pedagogy of teacher education that will move not only our individual practice but also our collective practice forward.
This report describes the adaptations made to one initial teacher education course at a Hong Kong university designed for face-to-face instruction that was required to be delivered exclusively online ...due to the suspension of face-to-face classes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. It describes the adaptations the tutor made, and the challenges faced adapting to the new mode of delivery. It is hoped that others can learn from the author's experience and be prepared for the suspension of face-to-face classes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic or other health emergencies.
Despite longstanding criticisms of teacher education, the weight of substantial evidence indicates that teachers who have had more preparation for teaching are more confident and successful with ...students than those who have had little or none. Recent evidence also indicates that reforms of teacher education creating more tightly integrated programs with extended clinical preparation interwoven with coursework on learning and teaching produce teachers who are both more effective and more likely to enter and stay in teaching. An important contribution of teacher education is its development of teachers’ abilities to examine teaching from the perspective of learners who bring diverse experiences and frames of reference to the classroom.
This open access book follows the development of the Building Resilience in Teacher Education (BRiTE) project across Australia and internationally. Drawing on the success of this project and the ...related research collaborations that have since emerged, it highlights the importance of cultivating resilience at various stages of teachers’ careers. Divided into three sections, the book includes conceptual, empirical and applied chapters, designed to introduce readers to the field of research, provide empirical evidence and showcase innovative applications. The respective chapters illustrate the ways in which teacher resilience can be enhanced in a variety of contexts, and address specific learning activities, case studies, resources and strategies, student feedback and applied outcomes. They also consider future directions including cross-cultural applications and the use of technologies such as augmented reality. The book will appeal to researchers, teacher educators and teachers, as well as those interested in supporting the cultivation and ongoing development of professional resilience for pre-service and practicing teachers.
There is growing interest in the professional development of teacher educators as the demands, expectations, and requirements of teacher education increasingly come under scrutiny. The manner in ...which teacher educators learn to traverse their world of work in the development of their knowledge, skills, and ability is important. This article outlines some of the crucial shaping factors in that development, including the transition associated with becoming a teacher educator, the nature of teacher education itself, and the importance of researching teacher education practices. Through a careful analysis of these features, a framework for better understanding what it might mean to professionally develop as a teacher educator is proposed. The framework is designed to draw serious attention to the major aspects of teaching and learning about teaching that are central to shaping scholarship in teacher education and offer insights into the ways in which teacher educators' professional development might be better understood and interpreted. Author abstract
Supporting teachers to acknowledge the influence of structural inequities in their classrooms is a perennial challenge in teacher education. There is a need for research on supporting teachers to do ...the important work of noticing structural inequities in their classrooms. Using qualitative methods, the present study responds to this need, revealing that one teacher educator pedagogy may have supported teachers to notice the influence of structural inequities in their classrooms. In an analysis that juxtaposes teacher noticing and teacher educator pedagogies, this manuscript tells a story of initial teacher resistance, teacher educator persistence, and resulting teacher noticing of structural inequities.
•Teachers often struggle to notice structural inequities in their classrooms.•Teacher education focused only on teachers’ knowledge insufficiently prepares teachers to notice classroom structural inequities.•Findings present analyses on teacher noticing during and after participation in a practicebased professional development.•Situating teacher learning in practice alone may insufficiently support teachers noticing of classroom structural inequities.•Grounding practice-based teacher education experiences in data is a promising pedagogy for justice-oriented teacher education.
Worldwide, teacher educators and policy makers have called for teacher preparation that is more deeply linked to practice. Yet we know little about how such linkages are achieved within different ...international programs. We examine the degree to which programs provide opportunities to learn that are grounded in practice, during university coursework. We report on observation data (N = 104 hr) from the methods courses in six programs in Finland, Norway, and California. Using an analytical framework decomposing the conception of “grounding in practice” in teacher education, this article provides evidence regarding the successes and challenges of incorporating practice in teacher education.
From an educational-historical view this book analyses the cultural models that underlie the conception and organisation of secondary teacher education and the professionalisation of future secondary ...school teachers in Europe. Based on different conceptions of school, citizenship and the teaching profession these models have an enormous influence on school policy. Taking the examples of Italy and Germany, the complex history of teacher education is reconstructed and analysed. The various articles deal in a long-term view with the emergence of national models of teacher education at the end of the 18th century, their consolidation in the 19th and 20th centuries and their transnational transformation between past and present.
"Der Band setzt sich bildungsgeschichtlich mit den kulturellen Modellen auseinander, die im europäischen Kontext der Konzeption und der Organisation der Lehrerbildung im Sekundarbereich und der Professionalisierung der zukünftigen Gymnasiallehrer zugrunde liegen. Sie gehen von unterschiedlichen Vorstellungen von Schule, Bürgerschaft und Lehrberuf aus und haben einen enormen Einfluss auf die Schulpolitik. An den beiden exemplarischen Fällen Italien und Deutschland wird die vielschichtige Geschichte der Lehrerbildung historisch rekonstruiert und analysiert. In einer Langzeitbetrachtung befassen sich die einzelnen Beiträge mit der Entstehung nationaler Modelle der Lehrerbildung am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts, mit ihrer Konsolidierung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert und ihrer transnationalen Transformation in der Gegenwart."