This volume of JET represents its Golden Jubilee of recording research in the academic field of the education of teachers for fifty years. More about this in subsequent issues, but, true to form, this first in the volume contains another tranche of innovative articles from a rich variety of contexts across the world to inform practice and policy in both initial and continuing teacher education.
Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that each issue of JET now contains up to twelve full papers; this is due to our publisher’s recent decision to base the contents on article count rather than page count, which is good news for our authors, as we can accept more articles for publication. The Editorial Board will not be compromising on quality, however. The submission rate to JET has increased exponentially in the last five years enabling us considerably to strengthen our remit of acceptance by focussing on the criteria of originality, international significance, rigorous methodology and presentation, and ethical research. This has also had an impact on the increased Impact Factor of our journal, which now positions JET as a world leading publication of research in teacher education. My thanks for this are due to JET’s hard working Editorial Board, the expertise and generosity of our International Editorial Board and of course, to our referees and authors.
The first paper in this issue is from Lucía Sánchez-Tarazaga and colleagues from Jaume I University, Castellón in Spain, whose research considered the development of student teachers’ social competences and how this played out as they learned to teach. They found that although student teachers placed considerable importance on social competences, on completion of their initial training course graduates valued such competences as collaboration, teamwork, participation and community relations more highly than did the student teachers still in training. Coexistence, community building and engendering a culture of collaboration are vital life skills and incorporation of the development of these as part of a master’s level initial teacher education programme is a strong testament to the provision in in this institution.
The theme of civic competence is taken forward by the next article in another context, that of the professional development of the social studies teacher. Allan de Guzman and colleagues from the University of Santos Thomas in Manila, the Philippines, investigated critical enquiry approaches to the teaching of controversial issues. They found that when introducing important but challenging social issues in the classroom, teachers were motivated to develop criticality, reflection and an action orientation in their learners. The next article, by Jelena Maksimović and colleagues from two universities in Serbia echoes this research. They were interested in the development of pupils’ social competences and the resultant outcomes. They found that teachers across the phases and disciplines were expected to be exemplary role models of altruism and empathy in developing their learners’ prosocial skills. These two examples of empowering and democratising practice surely behoves teachers of all academic disciplines?
The relationship of social to emotional competence is close, and the latter is the focus of the next article, by Andrea Baroncelli and colleagues from the Universities of Perugia and Florence in Italy. Positioning their study within the theoretical framing of Structural Family Therapy, they describe three types of boundary between the characteristics and skills of teachers’ personal and professional standpoints. Their results inform programmes for the development of teachers’ emotional and relational competences and also the skills to reflect on the importance of clear boundaries between them. This tricky balancing act is also the theme of the next article, by Shaoan Zhang and Daniel Unger, from the University of Nevada in the USA. They looked at the dyad relationship between school-based teacher mentors and student teachers during practicum. The extent to which the mentor disclosed personal and professional experiences was reflected in the quality of the placement as a learning environment. This was enhanced when mentors provided emotional support, facilitating student teachers better to comprehend the teacher’s role and to become encultured into the profession. The power of the critical friend corroborates this finding. In the following article, Chin-Wen Chien of National Tsing University in Taiwan, finds that Taiwanese early career primary school teachers who formed critical friendships to support their professional development focussed mainly on the imperatives of lesson planning and classroom management, but that time was a limiting factor in maximising the positive effect of critical friendships. The balance of the personal and the professional in teaching is nuanced and highly individualised, but the discernment and practice of negotiating those boundaries are critical elements of any teacher education programme. It is good to report the researched evidence for this in JET.
As all teacher educators will recognise, classroom and behaviour management are one of the most serious concerns of student and novice teachers. Stuart Woodcock and Andres Reupert of Griffith and Monash Universities respectively in Australia looked at how newly qualified primary school teachers managed their classes. They found that the teachers favoured positive approaches, such as rewarding, using preventative strategies and low-level correcting, but that the latter was the least effective. The opportunity for reflection on learning opportunities is at the heart of effective professional development.
Inculcating a habit of reflective practice is a foundation of any teacher education programme and the enhancement of this is the focus of the next article, from Íris Susana Pires Pereira from the University of Minho in Portugal and her colleagues from Canada and Spain. They devised the novel intervention of a sheltered reflective practicum as part of the university-based element of their programme in which student teachers developed their pedagogic content knowledge in the context of language and literary education. The learning gain of the intervention s demonstrated and provides evidence for the development of enhanced reflective skills and positive motivation for teaching, with reduced anxiety about such matters as class management.
Triggered stimulation to reflect on teaching has been a strategy often used in initial and continuing teacher education courses. The next paper provides a new methodology for analysing language lessons as an aid to reflection on practice. Victor Lim Fei of Nanyang Technical University in Singapore describes the use of lesson microgenres and network graphs to map the process of a lesson. This enables the teacher or researcher to select small episodes or segments of a lesson and juxtapose the text and context, and the network graphing system enables the visualisation of patterns, progression, and connections to be made of the microgenres. This has the potential as a powerful teacher education tool in a range of lesson contexts.
It could be argued that reflective practice is one of the losers in highly regulated performative educational systems. The next article in this issue comes from Adam Poole of the Beijing Foreign Studies University, in China. Teachers’ struggles to implement their professional learning within a normalised post-performative system is highlighted in the context of Chinese private school teachers undertaking a professional development qualification aimed at developing enhanced learning, critical engagement with educational theories and concepts and focussing on effective and reflective practice. It is argued that in this context, critical reflection has taken on a new meaning: teachers as ‘empathetic’ as opposed to ‘public’ intellectuals. The extent to which this ontological shift may have implications for teacher educators beyond the specific context of this study is discussed.
As has been clearly exemplified by the range of papers in this issue, one great joy of JET is the sheer variety of educational contexts in which the articles are set. Our next paper is again, completely different. Luan Shaw of the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in the UK describes the development of pedagogic content knowledge (PCK) in music students learning to teach their particular musical instrument. Arguing that the unique setting of a conservatoire confers a range of transferable skills on the students, enabling them to be confident communicators of a language-free medium, Shaw develops the notion of Transferable Content Knowledge (TCK) and combines this with Values Based Knowledge (VBK), which encapsulates those professional qualities and behaviours required to forge positive relationships and learning environments to produce what he terms Developing Content Knowledge (DPK), the flourishing of PCK. This is an unusual example of a unique feature of a specific academic discipline – in this case music – providing a new concept that can be applied in other contexts.
The focus of the final full paper in this issue is upon the teacher educator and the factors affecting their career motivation. Nancy Leech and colleagues from the University of Colorado, Denver in the USA surveyed members of the faculties of education in a range of research-intensive US universities and found that although they were highly motivated in their work and committed to their role, they felt that there were few alternative career options open to them. The authors speculate about the effect this may have on the development of these academics’ research literacy and the extent to which they role model this to their student teachers. This is a hot topic for JET and for teacher education globally and it is good that we have researched evidence of possible impediments to the propagation of the notion of teaching as an intellectual activity, grounded in research.
The academic papers in this issue conclude with a single Research-in-Progress article, from Luis Dos Santos of Woosong University in South Korea. This reports on a study of second career teachers, coming into the profession from engineering. Two interesting book reviews wrap up this first issue of our Jubilee Year volume. It is both encouraging and amazing to reflect on the fifty years of research in teacher education that has been published in this journal. It is also a privilege and pleasure to be at the helm of the good ship JET as she sails onward, faithfully recording the findings of our authors, those numerous shiny gems than can – and must – inform teacher education policy makers and practitioners internationally.