Teachers work in increasingly complex and diverse settings and they have very different and changing professional learning needs. These learning needs may be very specific to teachers or to the context in which they work. This means that teachers need professional learning opportunities that are tailored to their own needs and they need teacher educators who have different knowledge, skills and expertise to support and challenge them at different times in their career. In this second issue of the 40th volume of the European Journal of Teacher Education (EJTE), the theme of looking back and looking forward continues. The complexity of learning and teaching creates challenges for teacher education and the articles in this issue consider a selection of these challenges from different perspectives. Some are general challenges that are likely to be of concern to many teachers, such using formative assessment strategies and making use of technology to enhance the learning environment. Other challenges addressed in the articles are more specific to particular curriculum subjects or to particular groups of pupils, such as laboratory teaching for chemistry teachers or teaching pupils with severe, profound and multiple learning difficulties.
The first article in this issue is a departure from the articles typically published in EJTE in that it takes a look back over the last 23 years through a documentary analysis of 616 journal articles addressing key competences in education. Buscà, Ambròs and Burset, the authors of the first article, suggest that competence discourse became a significant topic of debate in education over the last two decades. Their study aimed to identify the extent to which the body of literature published (in peer-reviewed journal articles indexed in the Educational Resources Information Centre database) has contributed to the implementation of competence-based education in the classroom. According to Buscà et al.’s findings, the main contribution of articles on competency-based education is related to reflection on competence discourse and to the implementation of education policies. They suggest that articles presenting examples and empirical evidence aimed at developing basic competences are limited. This article looking back at key competence discourse is particularly relevant today as the European Commission looks forward in its consideration of key competences in education for the next generation. In 2006, the European Parliament approved a recommendation in which eight key competences were defined (communication in the mother tongue; communication in a foreign language; mathematical competence and basic competences in science and technology; digital competence; learning to learn; social and civic competence; sense of initiative and entrepreneurship; and cultural awareness and expression). An ongoing review is considering whether the 2016 key competence framework requires to be amended to remain relevant in future learning contexts.
Education standards are another aspect of education that have featured strongly in educational debate and like key competences have been widely contested. In the second article in this issue, Douglas offers a critical examination of the use of teachers’ standards for student teachers engaged in teacher education. Through the use of an illustrative data example, he highlights shortcomings in the current education of student teachers in England. Douglas suggests that by focusing heavily on meeting required teachers’ standards, the school teaching practice in the data example does not encourage student teachers or teachers to develop their understanding of teaching. He suggests that neither the context of the teacher education nor personal views of participants is taken into account. The author concludes that ways of analysing experiences recognising the influence of schools in affecting the kinds of learning available to student teachers are needed in England to increase understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of different approaches to school-based teacher education.
The focus on initial teacher education continues in the next four articles, with each considering different challenges for student teachers. Hamodi, V.M. López-Pastor and A.T. López-Pastor analyse whether having experience of formative assessment during ITE in Spain influences graduates’ subsequent practice as teachers. The authors investigate the extent to which the assessment methods that university students experience during their ITE programme are employed by them during their professional practice as school teachers. Hamodi found that formative assessment was not used significantly during the student teachers’ ITE programme. However, it was highly valued by the students and some did subsequently implement it in their practice. The authors’ findings also identified a range of variables regarding the barriers to implementation of formative practice in schools (e.g. resistance from colleagues and/or pupils’ parents). Hao and Lee’s article explores student teachers’ concerns about the integration of Web 2.0 instruction in Taiwan. The authors found that student teachers’ greatest concern was in the area of self-concern. The findings provide an insight into the importance of personalising teachers’ professional learning in order to influence the change process required for Web 2.0 integration in instruction; highlighting the need for tailored learning opportunities for teachers. Yalcin Celik, Kadayifci, Uner and Turan Oluk examine the challenges faced by student teachers teaching chemistry in a laboratory setting and their proposed solutions to these challenges. In their study the authors found that the student teachers in Turkey expressed a range of challenges (e.g. content knowledge, laboratory experiments, planning and implementing instruction). However, these identified challenges differed from those observed by the researchers involved in the study. This finding demonstrates that what is acknowledged as a challenge by student teachers may not be recognised in the same way for those observing their practice. The researchers also suggested that the students’ proposed solutions were not sufficient, coherent or explicit. The final article set in the context of ITE concerns the process of preparing for and conducting action research among student teachers attending a course on Research Literacy at a teacher education college in Israel. The authors, Amir, Mandler, Hauptman and Gorev, investigated student teachers conducting an action research project concerning their classroom activities. The authors’ findings highlight the specific challenges the students faced in formulating a research question suited to action research.
The next two articles concern studies carried out in Norway. The first article is set in the context of career-long professional learning and the second in the context of ITE. Valle, investigates how Norwegian teachers’ intuitive actions appear in the classroom, and also draws attention to the tacit aspects of these actions. The author discusses how teachers’ education can facilitate the development of this competency, which she suggests is particularly necessary in enabling teachers to handle unexpected situations in creative ways. Klemp’s article discusses experiences from a teacher education intervention project which focused on a triadic collaboration between student teachers, mentors and lecturers within a digital space. The author explores why some of the members in the triad virtually disappeared from the collaboration project and why the digital meeting place collapsed.
In the final article, Jones and Riley explore the perspectives of seven teachers in England who teach pupils with severe, profound and multiple learning difficulties. The study focuses on the teachers’ own professional learning in this context. Although the study involved a small number of teachers, the article provides an insight into teacher learning which has implications for teacher education more generally. The authors support teacher learning as a holistic process and highlight the value that teachers place on learning through doing in the classroom, learning through self-inquiry and research and through learning from and with others.
University of Glasgow