Best practice in teacher education: what is research telling us?

For almost the last fifty years, JET has showcased evidenced examples of ‘good’ practice in teacher education. The papers in the successive volumes have focussed on such aspects of this as the content and coherence of teacher education programmes, curricular themes such as cognitive development, subject pedagogy, inclusion and assessment, field experiences, enquiry approaches that span the research-practice nexus, reflective practice, and school mentorship. For these, and many other issues pertinent to the provision of high-quality teacher education such as recruitment, accreditation, teachers’ standards and professional development, debate has raged about what is ‘good’.

In 2014, two separate reports were published that strove to identify research-informed best practice principles for the design, delivery and assessment of those teacher education programmes that most effectively support the transition of student (pre-service) teachers to becoming effective practitioners. The first, from the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER 2014) identified a consensus about what beginning teachers should know and be able to do. They suggest that good practice in teacher education provision relies on the following eight characteristics: programmes must have coherence; a strong core curriculum; extensive, connected practicum experiences; well-defined standards of professional knowledge and practice; explicit strategies to enable student teachers to understand their own beliefs and attitudes about learning and diversity; clear connection between theory and practice through investigation; strong school-university partnership and standards-based formative assessment. Although only one element of this list explicitly mentions the role of research, it is clear that each is reinforced by it.

The second report, from the British Educational Research Association entitled Research and the Teaching Profession (BERA 2014), concluded that the contribution of research to teacher education programmes is fourfold: research can inform the design and content of programmes and providers can be both consumers and producers of research. This report has informed many papers that have sought to demonstrate the importance of teaching as a research-based profession, (see for example la Velle and Kendall, 2015; Flores 2018; Anwer and Reiss 2022).

Continuing the discussion of what constitutes good practice in teacher education, our first paper in this issue, from Antoni Badia and colleagues from Spain, presents a study situated in a research-based professional development programme. Teachers drew on research to voice their perceptions about its usefulness and place in their professional work. The emerging categorisation of the ways in which the teachers drew on research to express how it informed their engagement with curricular content demonstrates an effective enhancement of their practice.

Our next paper shifts the focus from teachers as consumers of research to teachers as producers of research. Emma Salter and Lyn Tett from the UK developed a successful community of practitioner research in the context of primary school religious education. Reporting on the enhancement of the participants’ practice, this study provides an excellent example of how engagement in practitioner research can contribute to the knowledge base for teaching in a specific context, enrichment of teachers’ critical reflection on their own practice and general school improvement.

Collaboration is of course, the key here and research continually shows us that as a way of working it is almost context free. We move now to Eritrea, a country with developing provision of teacher education. A partnership was formed between an established Finnish university and the College of Education in Eritrea to provide professional development opportunities for Eritrean teacher educators. Hanna Posti-Ahorkas and her colleagues from both countries showed the importance and effectiveness of strengthening teacher educators’ professional identities through international collaboration. In contrasting contexts, this study also demonstrates the power of collaboration in capacity building at both the individual and institutional levels.

Timjen Schipper and his colleagues from the Netherlands present a study reported in the next paper on a different aspect of professional collaboration: that of lesson study. Here, the participants again are teacher educators, who engaged in lesson study to evaluate the extent to which and when it is an appropriate approach for developing their professional learning and that of their student teachers. Their findings showed the importance of such methods for knowledge exchange and reducing the ‘silo’ effect of professional isolation.

Another African/Scandinavian collaborative study, this time between South Africa and Norway, is reported in the next paper, by Janet Jarvis, Olav Christian Ruus and their colleagues. Investigating student teachers’ understanding of what they believe to be best practice, these researchers used the affordances of internet conferencing technology to facilitate what they call a ‘Community in Conversation’. Student teachers were enabled to engage in self-dialogue and self-narrative in south-north geographical contexts resulting in transformational re-storying of their beliefs and assumptions.

It is well established that beliefs and attitudes strongly underpin the motivation for teaching as a career (see for example OECD 2009). In our next paper, by Gokan Bas from Turkey, the relationships between student teachers’ beliefs about teaching, self-efficacy for teaching, attitudes towards teaching and motivation for teaching were examined. In this context it was found that all these variables were positively correlated, but that self-efficacy had a mediating effect. Again, it can be seen that this demonstration, using a correlation research model, is virtually context free.

Our final full paper in this issue, also from Turkey, by Saadet Korucu-Kış, reports on a study into another pedagogic strategy, that of flipped learning, in the context of teacher education. As ‘digital natives’ (Prensky 2001), current student teachers are generally tech-savvy, but with individual learning characteristics. The flipped classroom approach was shown to aid preparation, enhance a deeper understanding of course content and encourage learning autonomy. Perhaps predictably, student teachers also reported an increase in workload, technical problems, and isolation from immediate support as more negative aspects of their ‘flipped’ experience.

Our Research-in-Progress series provides the final paper in this issue and is from Thailand, by Thinley Wangdi, who reports on student teachers’ academic writing, their challenges and academic needs for improvement.

Each of these research-informed collaborative strategies provide further pointers to what might be ‘good’ practice, but this is rarely definitive or totally context free. The mission to identify the ‘best’ practice in teacher education continues, but this superlative remains far off and is probably only fleeting. However, this does not stop this journal from continuing to publish papers with a research-based claim for ‘better’ (and better) practice.