Career opportunities play an important role in keeping teachers passionate and motivated in their profession. As such opportunities contribute to growth, challenge, variation and recognition, they can both attract high quality candidates to the profession and keep talented teacher in the profession for a longer time. However, the traditional view on the teacher profession can be considered as static with little career opportunities. This raises the questions: how teacher careers can be understood, and what the implications for such a more dynamic understanding are for education systems, school heads, teachers and for teacher education.Taking into account this questions, six international reports on teacher careers that aim to support national systems to strengthen career opportunities for teachers are explored in this chapter. These reports from the European Commission’s Working Groups on Schools, the Commissions data network Eurydice, OECD and UNESCO, all emphasize the importance of strengthening career opportunities for teachers, but vary in their focus, as most report focus on formal career structures that are embedded in national legislation, while the EC’s Working Group Schools report from 2020 takes a somewhat wider perspective, taking the perspective of teacher more as a starting point in identifying career options. From the reports the implications for teachers, school heads and teacher education can be derived, including the need for a wider and more dynamic view on the profession, leading to a wider professional identity, the need for the development of career competences for teachers and the need for initial teacher education institutes to actively support teachers not only during their initial development, but throughout the different stages of their career.
Using game-based learning (GBL) has a proven potential to be an effective didactical method but it is not easy to implement in practice. Teachers find e.g. difficult to match a particular game dynamics and the curricular goals or to connect with the pedagogical models of particular games.In order to support student-teachers to develop pedagogical knowledge and skills to effectively apply this method we are developing a course about Game Based Pedagogy (GBP) for the teacher education program. This project is a Teaching Fellows Comenius (see (https://www.nro.nl/en/onderzoeksprogrammas/comeniusprogramma/toegekende-projecten).The development and implementation of the course follows a co-creation process in an interdisciplinary team involving high-school teachers, teacher educators and the Smart Education lab for Applied AI.In this workshop we present our first prototype of the course and invite the participants, through hands-on activities to explore some of the games, materials and examples that we developed. This workshop is intended for high school teachers, teacher educators and anyone who is interested in integrating Game-Based Pedagogy into practice.
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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