Governments, and even some school and head teachers, seem to expect fledgling, newly qualified teachers to be, in effect, fully fledged the minute they walk into the classroom fresh from their teacher preparation programme. The multi-cultural research that Anna Elizabeth du Plessis and Eva Sunde report on identifies the importance of the working partnerships between higher education providers and schools so as to help teachers at the start of their profession come first to understand and then manage the complicated teaching situations they will find themselves in once they start their career. Of course, what might be called monist teacher education programmes (those based totally in schools) might appear at first not to require the development of the partnerships that typify the dualist programmes which involve both schools and universities. To adopt such a position would be to ignore, amongst many other factors, the points made by research regarding the need for beginning teachers to feel at home in their school and to ‘belong’ to the profession. These are two elements that both schools and providers might well need to consider more formally as they go beyond a relatively superficial induction programme.
Issues surrounding the problem of readiness-for-the-job is the focus of the paper by Zulaikha Mohamed, Martin Valcke and Bram De Wever. They begin by examining what is understood by the concept of teacher competencies in eleven different countries. These international competencies are then compared to the teacher education programmes that presumably have to take some or all of them into account in identifying successful graduates of their programmes. As before, the assumption underlying such competencies is that a teacher education programme can produce what might be termed the finished product straight off their assembly line, an assumption that only has to be voiced for its naïvete to be recognised. After all, given the open-ended nature of teaching such that even experienced teachers continue to learn about teaching it is nonsensical to assume that meeting a set of competencies will in and of itself transform the novice student into the master teacher.
Chris Wilkins’ research spotlights a group of student teachers whose concerns are often noticeable by their absence. It is perhaps natural to think of student teachers as young, fresh from their undergraduate programme and so aged between 21 and 22. However, there is another group of student teachers that need to be considered, those who join a teacher education programme after having moved from a previous career. These Wilkins identifies as ‘high status, elite, professionals’ who clearly have rather different needs than their younger and less worldly-wise classmates as they move from having high status as an expert in their previous career to being a lowly novice student teacher. A key skill that this group of students makes use of to cope with the difficulties they meet on their programme and in particular in school is their ability to make use of the effective forms of resilience they developed in their previous career. However, the reasons why this group of students who appear to have the psychological tools to survive moments of crisis on their programme are in fact less likely to complete their teacher education programme remain unclear, although Wilkins does suggest possible answers to this puzzle to consider as an agenda for further research.
Corinne Wyss, Mirjam Kocher and Matthias Baer also examine through their comparative research what they term ‘novice teachers’. They videoed lessons given by novice and experienced teachers to compare the kind of teaching each offered. It is perhaps no surprise to learn that both groups of teachers tended to be very conservative in their methods, although the fact that the novice teachers so quickly moved away from the alternative forms of pedagogy that they had been introduced to on their university programmes is surprising and not a little worrying.
Another approach to the pedagogy that might be used on a teacher education programme is provided by Chunmei Yan and Chuanjun He. They point out that there has been considerable research on the usefulness or otherwise of microteaching on teacher education programmes, but very little on what they term ‘paired microteaching’. They argue that although microteaching is necessarily artificial, as it rarely if ever makes use of real classrooms and the direct teaching of real children, paired microteaching provides experiences which are seen as valuable by the students. The students which they researched were those preparing to teach English as a Foreign Language on a course which was university based. However, even a school-based programme offering other subject areas could find this approach of some use, if only to assist student teachers come to understand fundamental pedagogical issues in their field.
It is the school-based element of teacher preparation that Helen Trevethan examines from a novel perspective, that of the teachers qua mentor. Three models of teaching preparation are identified (although it has to be said that all three represent different forms of the dualist approach) so as to identify connections between the approaches assumed by the university and those actually used in practice by the schools. The project was initially intended as a way of developing better understandings between the ITE provider and the schools in a specific New Zealand context, and it would be interesting to see if another model, whereby the university has little or no input (the monist approach to preparing teachers) might well be something that appeals to those in New Zealand and elsewhere actively reconceptualising the nature of teacher education programmes.
Sum Kwing Cheung, Elsa Ka-Wei Ling and Suzannie Kit Ying Leung raise concerns with the initial teacher education of early childhood teachers. They make use of a large data-set of Hong Kong student teachers so as to study their beliefs regarding the importance of certain environmental factors required for child-centred learning to take place effectively. In addition, they use this data to see how these beliefs connect, if at all, to their actual pedagogic practices, a particular problem in a culture which appears to give preference to more traditional teacher-centred pedagogies.
JET has recently published research examining issues examining sexuality as an important aspect of diversity in teacher education in Ireland (see Heinz, Keane, and Davison Citation2017). The next paper also deals with a similar concern but within an Italian context, setting out to make overt, the otherwise tacit beliefs and assumptions that affect a student’s practice. There is much that has to be accommodated within a teacher education programme, including how to deal with bullying and the many forms of discrimination and oppression that a child might experience in school. Cristiano Scandurra, Simon Picariello, Paolo Valerio and Anna Lisa Amodeo’s fascinating paper addresses the prejudice that can be caused by sexism, homophobia and transphobia in schools, in particular whether there are social factors which might create such harassment in teacher education students. Their paper identifies such factors, which then allows for the possibility that teacher education programmes can address their students’ sexual and gender prejudices through various interventions.
This issue of JET concludes with an In Practice paper in which Bo Wang, Timothy Teo and Shulin Yu use a case study to examine the way in which teachers provide feedback on the oral skills of a student’s teaching of a second language. They argue that their preliminary research suggests that feedback should go beyond merely commenting on the language use itself and more on the strategies used in a lesson, something that might well apply in other subject domains.
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