Section archive - Trends in Teacher Education

This article aims to provide a concrete illustration of a practice-based teacher education strategy. This strategy applied to the preparation of high school biology teachers learning to enact lab lessons that enhance opportunities for students to engage in reasoning with scientific concepts. The authors conclude that the tools of the bridging approach presented in the article—the heuristic goal system and the teaching impact analysis— allow teachers to construct their own authentic representations of the components of their practice and the values and goals that hold their practice in place. As a result, the path to improvement can be made both concrete and attainable.

In this article, the author discusses how to enhance Japanese teacher education. After sketching teacher education from the mid-1940s to the 1960s, he sums up the main topics people discussed through each decade of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s. The author concludes by proposing an ideal network for promoting teaching expertise. He proposed establishing education networks in which universities, junior colleges, schools, education authorities, youth and children, teachers, parents and communities could join together with equal partnership to discuss almost all of local education plans. The author hopes that in such ways, all teachers could be educated, trained and recruited as independent intellectuals who could serve education within the national–international–global contexts of higher education-based teacher education.

In this article, a short history of Finnish teacher education has been presented and the main developments during the last 40 years discussed. The status of the teaching profession has remained very high in Finland during all these years. Teachers are trusted and respected, and the profession attracts good students year after year. This is a unique advantage to teacher education in Finland by comparison with other countries. The ethical role of a teacher has changed from that of a religious and moral example to a principled professional who needs moral competence in pedagogical encounters.

This article explores the work of teacher education in England and Scotland. It seeks to locate this work within conflicting sociocultural views of professional practice and academic work. Drawing on an activity theory framework that integrates the analysis of these seemingly contradictory discourses with a study of teacher educators’ practical activities, including the material artefacts that mediate the work, the article offers a critical perspective on the social organisation of university-based teacher education.