scholarly journals Development of Teachers’ Beliefs as a Core Component of their Professional Identity in Initial Teacher Education: A Longitudinal Perspective

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vlasta Vizek Vidović ◽  
Vlatka Domović
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Education ◽  
Professional Identity ◽  
Student Teachers ◽  
Cognitive Theory ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Initial Teacher Education ◽  
Professional Beliefs ◽  
Study Programme ◽  
Teachers Beliefs ◽  
Teachers Professional Development

The main aim of this research is to longitudinally examine the shift in teaching students’ professional beliefs about the teacher-pupil role during the course of their studies. The starting assumption has been that teachers’ professional development is largely dependent upon their beliefs about various aspects of their professional role. The beliefs about the teacher-pupil role are the building blocks of teachers’ professional identity, which strongly influence the way they teach and communicate with pupils. The participants in the research are 62 student teachers, from three teacher education faculties, who were prepared to teach in the lower grades of primary school. The research was carried out in two waves, at the beginning and at the end of the five-year study programme. The beliefs were explored using a metaphor technique derived from the cognitive theory of metaphor. The results indicate that exposure to the study programme did not considerably affect the change in the belief orientations, meaning that pre-professional beliefs remained unchanged, especially in the perception of the pupil’s role. That finding has been discussed in relation to the possible implications for the initial teacher education curriculum and its implementation.

scholarly journals Prepared to Teach for Sustainable Development? Student Teachers’ Beliefs in Their Ability to Teach for Sustainable Development

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Dahl
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Education ◽  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Student Teachers ◽  
Education For Sustainable Development ◽  
Initial Teacher Education ◽  
Teacher Professionalism ◽  
Teachers Beliefs ◽  
The Status ◽  
Education Today ◽  
Environmentally Sound

The importance of embedding education for sustainable development has been emphasised over many years. At the same time, there has been a massive call for initial teacher education to provide all student teachers with the core of professional competences. What is the status of teacher education today in embedding education for sustainable development and how does it relate to the focus on professional competencies in teacher education? A total of 578 student teachers in seven different teacher education programmes in Europe were surveyed, measuring the students’ beliefs in their ability to work as teachers, as well as their ability to teach in ways that value sustainability and promote environmentally sound ways of living. The results of the survey show that student teachers feel well prepared to handle many aspects of teacher professionalism, but less prepared to educate for sustainability. The survey also indicates that student teacher training in educating for sustainability is not integrated in their other training and is generally just added on.

scholarly journals Primary Science Teaching – Is it Integral and Deep Experience For Students?

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inge Timoštšuk
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Education ◽  
Professional Identity ◽  
Pedagogical Content Knowledge ◽  
Student Teachers ◽  
Science Teaching ◽  
Content Knowledge ◽  
Primary Teachers ◽  
Initial Teacher Education ◽  
Education For Sustainability ◽  
Pedagogical Content

AbstractIntegral and deep pedagogical content knowledge can support future primary teachers’ ability to follow ideas of education for sustainability in science class. Initial teacher education provides opportunity to learn what and how to teach but still the practical experiences of teaching can reveal uneven development of student teachers’ professionality. The aim of the study is to describe how future primary teachers reflect on their experiences about science teaching and what components of science pedagogical content knowledge they see as meaningful. A questionnaire and interviews were used. The results reveal the deep impact of teaching practice on students’ understanding of the role of a teacher in supporting pupils’ acquisition of scientific skills. The experiences described are related more to teaching and learning in general and less with science-specific factors. Nevertheless, students described changes in mission e.g. how they learned about their role through pupils’ achievements and thinking about science. Changes in professional identity were mentioned rarely but this could point to an underestimated resource issue for teacher education. Positive changes in professional identity may help students to decide to choose more integral strategies in science teaching and thus promote more sustainability oriented teaching.

scholarly journals “This is why students feel lost when they go into teaching practice”: English Language Teachers’ Views on their Initial Teacher Education

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (10) ◽  
pp. 371-387
Author(s):  
Sue Garton
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Education ◽  
Student Teachers ◽  
English Language ◽  
Teaching Practice ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Language Teachers ◽  
Initial Teacher Education ◽  
Significant Shift ◽  
Snowball Sampling ◽  
Quantitative And Qualitative Research

The last 20-25 years have seen a significant shift in the views about what teachers need to know to be able to teach. This shift has led to new developments in the theory of second language teacher education (SLTE) and a growth in research in this area. One area of research concerns the attitudes and expectations of those learning to become teachers. While most studies in this area focus on teacher education programmes in BANA countries, this article looks at data from student teachers studying in Russia and Uzbekistan. The study employed a quantitative and qualitative research design, using a researcher-designed on-line questionnaire. Through snowball sampling, data from 161 students and recent graduates in the two countries were collected, analysed, and compared to investigate the content of SLTE programmes. The study identified what the novice teachers felt were the strengths and weaknesses of their programme, and what changes they would like to see. Results showed that while the respondents were mainly satisfied with their methodology, and theoretical linguistics courses, they felt the need for more practice, both teaching and language practice. The data also revealed that, in Uzbekistan in particular, the idea of global English struggles to take hold as native-speaker models remain the norm. The implications of the study underline the need for SLTE to explicitly link theory to practice and to promote the idea of varieties of English, rather than focus on native-speaker norms.

scholarly journals Beginning Student Teachers’ Professional Identity

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-164
Author(s):  
Gregor STEINBEIß
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Education ◽  
Professional Identity ◽  
Student Teachers ◽  
Teacher Identity ◽  
Working Environment ◽  
First Year ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
Ideal Teacher ◽  
Knowledge Based ◽  
Teacher Students

Abstract: This article investigates teachers’ professional identity of beginning first-year students through their beliefs about being a teacher. The presented study focuses on Austrian teacher students’ (N=18) conceptions of becoming a professional; what convictions student teachers reflect on, which professional identity emerges and what synthesis of a professional teacher identity position can be portrayed at the beginning of teacher education. Through inductively driven content analysis all statements (N=401) have been combined, and a unified synthesis of a beginning student teachers’ professional identity was formed. Three main categories were found: the “ideal” teacher, “good” teaching, and the “optimal” working environment. The results showed a highly idealistic view of being a teacher. The majority of statements referred to teaching from a pupil-centered perspective by strongly emphasising personality traits, student-teacher relationships, and teachers’ professional knowledge. Based on the results, the role of professional identity in Austrian’s teacher education is discussed, and further implementations in research are recommended.

scholarly journals Practice-Focused Research in Initial Teacher Education

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Abbiss ◽  
Eline Vanassche
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Teacher Education ◽  
Student Teachers ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Teacher Educators ◽  
Teacher Educator ◽  
Initial Teacher Education ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Educational Systems ◽  
Theoretical Contribution

A review of the field of practice-focused research in Initial Teacher Education (ITE) reveals four broad genres of qualitative research: case studies of teacher education programs and developments; research into student teacher experience and learning; inquiry into teacher educators’ own learning, identity, and beliefs; and conceptual or theory-building research. This is an eclectic field that is defined by variation in methodologies rather than by a few clearly identifiable research approaches. What practice-focused research in ITE has in common, though, is a desire on the behalf of teacher educator researchers to understand the complexity of teacher education and contribute to shifts in practice, for the benefit of student teachers and, ultimately, for learners in schools and early childhood education. In this endeavor, teacher educator researchers are presented with a challenge to achieve a balance between goals of local relevance and making a theoretical contribution to the broader field. This is a persistent tension. Notwithstanding the capacity for practice-focused research to achieve a stronger balance and greater relevance beyond the local, key contributions of practice-focused research in ITE include: highlighting the importance of context, questioning what might be understood by “improvement” in teacher education and schooling, and pushing back against research power structures that undervalue practice-focused research. Drawing on a painting metaphor, each genre represents a collection of sketches of practice-focused research in ITE that together provide the viewer with an overview of the field. However, these genres are not mutually exclusive categories as any particular research study (or sketch) might be placed within one or more groupings; for example, inquiry into teacher educators’ own learning often also includes attention to student teachers’ experiences and case studies of teacher education initiatives inevitably draw on theory to frame the research and make sense of findings. Also, overviewing the field and identifying relevant research is not as simple as it might first appear, given challenges in identifying research undertaken by teacher educators, differences in the positioning of teacher educators within different educational systems, and privileging of American (US) views of teacher education in published research, which was counteracted in a small way in this review by explicitly including voices located outside this dominant setting. Examples of different types of qualitative research projects illustrate issues in teacher education that matter to teacher educator researchers globally and locally and how they have sought to use a variety of methodologies to understand them. The examples also show how teacher educators themselves define what is important in teacher education research, often through small-scale studies of context-specific teacher education problems and practices, and how there is value in “smaller story” research that supports understanding of both universals and particularities along with the grand narratives of teacher education.

scholarly journals Novice Teachers' Thinking Development from Practicum to Early Career

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Trang Hoang
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Education ◽  
Professional Identity ◽  
Student Teachers ◽  
Novice Teachers ◽  
Teaching Effectiveness ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Teaching Performance ◽  
Teaching Methodologies ◽  
Teaching Practicum

<p>Teacher education programmes have focused on training student teachers with knowledge of teaching methodologies and good teaching performance. What is going on inside student teachers’ minds in their processes of learning to teach is more difficult to observe and sometimes overshadowed by this primary focus. This study sets out to gain a deeper understanding of student teachers’ developing cognition while learning to teach.   The existing literature on teachers’ critical thinking, reflection, and cognition provides various frameworks each of which presents different levels or stages of teachers’ development in the respective domains. Each level or stage is characterised by certain concerns, beliefs, skills, discourse, or teaching behaviours. However, underlying processes of change – i.e. how teachers move from lower levels to higher levels of such development, what triggers such movement – and how such movement enhances their teaching effectiveness are under-researched. In addition, those existing frameworks describe major stages of teachers’ development during the whole of their professional journeys. Little research zooms in novice teachers’ thinking development.   This research takes an exploratory approach, without relying on any existing frameworks, to investigating and theorising the unseen thinking development processes of novice teachers during the important transition from teaching practicum to early career teaching. The research included three stages of inquiry in which one stage was developed from the previous stage and its results were constantly compared to those of the previous one. The first stage involved in-depth individual interviews with nine early career teachers. The second stage involved working closely with a cohort of five student teachers during four months of their teaching practicum in the same teacher training program. The third stage involved my following one of the cohort members into the first two years of his teaching through online communication about their experiences and thinking about language teaching in real-life contexts.   The close interaction with the novice teachers incrementally constructed a clearer picture of the complexity and dynamics of their thinking. The stories of the three groups revealed and confirmed a hierarchy of attention to core aspects of effective teaching. However, the movement across the hierarchy was not linear but fluctuating and causing dissonance between their cognition and practice. Moreover, the novice teachers’ thinking development also involved the development of generic thinking skills – from “either-or” thinking to “both-and” thinking, from single-perspective to multi-perspective thinking, and from a focus on the detail to 'big picture' thinking. Thinking development was found to go hand in hand with the development of teaching effectiveness, understanding of teaching methodologies, and awareness of professional identity.  This research proposes a tentative framework of novice teachers’ thinking development from teaching practicum to early career teaching. The framework presents both content and processes of their thinking changes, both internal and external factors influencing their thinking changes, and both teaching-domain-specific and general thinking skills. This framework suggests reconsidering the over-emphasis on surface teaching methodology and teaching performance in teacher education programs and calls for more attention to the thinking, emotions, and self-awareness which strongly influence novice teachers’ teaching performance and professional identity.</p>

iTE

2018 ◽  
pp. 2104-2118
Author(s):  
Brendan Mac Mahon ◽  
Seán Ó Grádaigh ◽  
Sinéad Ní Ghuidhir
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Education ◽  
Student Teachers ◽  
Professional Learning ◽  
Resource Sharing ◽  
Collaborative Design ◽  
Education Programme ◽  
Pedagogical Knowledge ◽  
Initial Teacher Education ◽  
Knowledge Development ◽  
Teaching Learning

Research on the use of iPad in initial teacher education is limited. This paper outlines a study to examine how the professional learning and pedagogical knowledge development of student teachers could be supported following 1:1 iPad deployment on a second level initial teacher education programme in Ireland. Findings show that iPad can be utilised both as an effective pedagogical tool and as a medium for the creation of new learning spaces where student teachers' professional and pedagogical knowledge development is supported through feedback, peer-learning, resource sharing and critical reflection. Creating resources with and for iPad as part of a collaborative design process can also support student teachers in developing and integrating technological, pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) within their approaches to teaching, learning and assessment. Implications for initial teacher education providers and the integration of technology within schools are outlined.

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