In general, teacher educators are considered to be educational specialists whose main task is to communicate content-based concepts to prospective teachers. However, unfortunately, most studies on teacher professional development overlook this specific language-oriented aspect of content-based teaching. Therefore, we address the aforementioned research gap and argue that teacher educators’ evaluation of their language-oriented performance in educational communication enhances the quality of their content-based teaching. Accordingly, we examine how the language-oriented performance of teacher educators is evaluated by both individual teacher educators (sample size N=3) and their students (N=32) in a small-scale intervention study. The findings of the study reveal that there is a relationship between the order of application of five language focus areas (i.e., language awareness, active listening, formalizing interaction, language support, and language and learning development, as noticed by the students), and teacher educators’ ability to apply these areas in accordance with their objectives related to content-based teaching.
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Research-based teacher education can be understood in different ways: as a call to understand teacher education institutions as research institutions, as the ambition to educate student teachers to have an inquiring attitude, as the basing of teacher education curricula on the latest research, or as a combination of all three.In this chapter we reflect on a method of connecting research, curriculum development and practice in teacher education, presenting a case study of a conversational community of teacher educators and researchers. The aim of the conversational community was to understand the process of curriculum design in teacher education as an inspiring and practical combination of design research, self-study, collaborative action research and curriculum study by teacher educators. This process was supported by a conversational framework in which curriculum development was understood as an ongoing dialogue between vision, intentions, design and practice in the teacher education curriculum. Using the conversational framework in this single case study of a conversational community, we have tried to connect teacher education research, curriculum development and practice in a meaningful way.
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Literature reveals that beginning teacher educators are dealing with organisational and professional difficulties in their induction period. At the Teacher Education Institute of Fontys University of Applied Sciences in Tilburg, The Netherlands, a special induction programme was developed for the induction period. The programme was designed using recommendations from literature and focused on both organisational induction as well as professional induction. This programme was evaluated through an inquiry. Experiences of participants and as non-participants in the programme were taken into account. The evaluation reveals that all beginning teacher educators (participants as well as non-participants) have learned a lot from their colleagues, for example through conversations or while preparing lessons together. The majority of the participants hold the opinion that the goals of the programme have been reached and they appreciate the programme for the possibility to exchange experiences with other beginning teacher educators.
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In the Netherlands, and in many other countries, teacher policy and teacher education are strongly focused on ensuring that teachers meet certain minimum standards. As all student teachers need to meet these standards, teacher education programmes might put the main emphasis on the ‘average’ student and pay little attention to students who can perform better, which would lead to a middle-ofthe-road perspective on teachers and teacher education curricula. However, there is a growing awareness within higher education of the diversity of students with respect to their abilities and ambitions. In the Netherlands, there are initiatives to develop excellence programmes and honours programmes that recognize and accept student diversity. Such programmes offer ‘excellent’ students new challenges in the development of their excellence. But as ‘excellence’ is not centrally defined, higher education institutes can define the concept independently. Here, we present two examples of teacher education institutes that have developed honours programmes that emphasize excellent student teachers. While traditionally honours programmes in universities are focused on stimulating outstanding research performance of excellent students, in both examples a different focus is taken. The honours programmes in these universities for applied sciences do not focus on academic performance, but focus more directly on the roles of outstanding teachers in schools. One of these institutes focuses on primary teacher roles, the other on secondary teacher roles. Both use research in the content of the honours programmes and in the evaluation of the programmes. Here, an analysis of the two programmes is related to developments in teacher policy and the teaching profession with respect to teacher excellence, e.g. the recent recommendation from the Netherlands Education Council to nominate the top 5% of teachers as ‘excellent teachers’ – a recommendation that was received with mixed feelings by teachers, teachers’ unions and school leaders
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This paper reports on the EU-project 'Professionally Networking Education and Teacher Training' (PRONETT). The key objective of the PRONETT project (2001-2004) is to develop a regional and cross national learning community of pre- and in-service teachers and teacher educators supported by webbased resources and tools to collaborate and to construct shared understandings of teaching and learning in a networked classroom. The reasons for the initiative and the design principles of the PRONETT portal offering a virtual infrastructure for the collaboration of participating students and teachers at www.PRONETT.org are presented. The initial pilots carried out by the project partners are described, highlighting the co-ordinating partners activities targeted at contributing to the local realisation of ICT-rich, competence based Teacher Education Provision. Results are reported of the evaluation and implementation efforts aimed at validating the original portal design and collecting information to inspire further project development and implementation strategies. We conclude by summarising the lessons learned and providing recommendations for improved and extended use and further dissemination of the project results and facilities.
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Recent studies have identified that the teacher is the most important factor influencing the quality of education. Following this line of reasoning, it is likely to assume that the teacher educator is the most important factor influencing the quality of teacher education. Although many research studies and policy documents attempt to identify the qualities of teachers, only a few publications address the quality of teacher educators. This paper examines the contemporaryEuropean policy debate on the quality and status of teacher educators. Two issues will be addressed. Firstly, to what extent is teacher educator regarded as a profession? Secondly, what actions and measures are proposed to maintain or increase the quality and status of the teacher educator profession? Based on literature on professions and professionalism, a framework has been developed to guide our examination of European policy documents on teacher education to identify to what extent these documents express notions of teacher educators as professionals.
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Mathematics teacher educators in primary teacher education need expert knowledge and skills in teaching in primary school, in subject matter and research. Most starting mathematics teacher educators possess only part of this knowledge and skills. A professional development trajectory for this group is developed and tested, where a design based research is used to evaluate the design. This paper describes the professional development trajectory and design. We conclude that the professional development design should focus on mathematical knowledge for teaching, should refer to both teacher education and primary education, should offer opportunities for cooperative learning, and need to use practice based research as a developmental tool.
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The first part of this paper will start with an introduction of the general context of the education system in The Netherlands. This is followed by a presentation of the general characteristics of the teacher education system, of the balance between school autonomy and government control, and of the general policies concerning teacher quality. The second part will give an elaboration of the system of teacher education by introducing five major developments that have shaped teacher education in the past twenty years, and by giving a more detailed description of each type of teacher education. In the third part, I reflect on the role of the government in steering innovations and quality improvement in the area of teacher education
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This study was conducted in the context of primary teacher education. The primary teacher education program at HU University of Applied Sciences is at the start of a curriculum redesign in which assessment for learning and feedback will be emphasized. We know assessment and feedback can increase student learning and performance. In the last couple of years students as feedback receivers are placed in the centre of the feedback process. When students actively take up feedback their engagement in feedback will increase. However, some feedback situations work well for them and some don’t. In this study we try to grasp both situations and figure out which factors of the feedback situation did work or did not. We focused on two processes during the interviews and the coding. The first process was about the feedback situation, which characteristics of the feedback context, the receiver and the sender were at hand, and second what did students do with the feedback, did they try to understand and use the feedback, react to or ask for new feedback. The aim of this study is to provide feedback situations that work for our students and use them as elements in the redesign of the curriculum.
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The present study focuses on the level of stress a teacher perceives when dealing with the most behaviorally challenging student in his or her classroom. To measure stress in Dutch elementary classrooms, a sample was drawn of 582 teachers. Two questions concerning this relation between student and teacher will be addressed. First of all, we focus on background variables of teachers and students as sources of variation in explaining the magnitude of challenging student behavior and the associated level of stress teachers experience. The second topic of this paper is to accommodate the potentially stressful relationship between student and teacher in a wider network of surrounding variables, which are, Self-efficacy, Negative affect, Autonomy in taking decisions, and Support amongst colleagues. To evaluate the presence of challenging behavior, the behavior of the student is related to more general variables like student responsibility, class size and ratio of boys to girls. We close our paper by assessing the validity of the studied relationship between teacher and student with respect to possible burnout.
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