CURRENT TRENDS IN TEACHER EDUCATION IN EUROPE

1. CURRENT TRENDS IN TEACHER EDUCATION IN EUROPE Elena Dudina (Senior Lecturer Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University)

2. This lecture • discusses developments in teacher education and training Europe-wide; • presents the main challenges the teacher profession is facing; • illustrates policy examples from selected European countries addressing these issues.

3. globalizationandmodernization Globalization is creating a fast paced, competitive environment through technology and communication, which education system must keep up with. Coming generation cannot be effective in tomorrow’s world if they are trained in yesterday’s skills.

4. Global educationinvolves: • the study of problems and issues which cut across national boundaries and the interconnectedness of cultural, environmental, economic, political, and technological systems; • the cultivation of cross-cultural understanding. Global perspectives are important at every grade level, in every curricular subject area, and for all children and adults.

5. Europe 2020 (The European strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth). The route to lasting economic recovery and social cohesion is knowledge and innovation (European Commission, 2010). Giving priority to investment in education and training even as budgets are consolidated following the economic crisis.

6. Europe 2020 In this new strategy for the development of European Union, teachers are acknowledged as key mediators for achieving structural change and innovation in education.

7. The tasks before the teachers are now becoming increasingly complex and manifold • Active and learner-centredmethods; • The rapid developments in the application of new technologies in education; • The changing skills needs in the labourmarket; • And the demand for an increasingly diverse and properly trained workforce, require highly qualified teachers with manifold qualifications.

8. Challenges ahead of a teacher education in Globalization • Professionalism: The education standard will improve if all the teachers have global perspective, well prepared and provided with ongoing professional development and appropriate support. • Competency and technology-based curriculum: the competency-based curriculum represents an approach to instruction, which emphasizes the application of the knowledge in a manner, which may be observed or measured. • Research in teacher education; • Use of integrated technology; • Mobility of teachers across the Globe; • Adaptability: Teachers need to be adapted to the socio-economic and cultural diversities of students in order to compete in the international sphere.

9. the best way to infuse global perspectives into teacher education programs is • by modeling pedagogy through the use of not just readings and lectures, but • role plays, • case studies, • collaborative investigation of useful resources among colleagues.

10. methods for pedagogy for global perspectives • exploration of self-knowledge, • cross-cultural experiences and skills, • perspective consciousness, • values analysis, • authentic learning.

11. Many nations around the world have undertaken wide-ranging reforms of curriculum, instruction, and assessments with the intention of better preparing all children for the higher educational demands of life and work in the 21st century.

12. what teacher preparation programs are needed to prepare graduates who are ready to teach well in a 21st century classroom • The world is also no longer divided into specialists and generalists. • What counts today are the versatilists who are able to apply depth of skill to a progressively widening scope of situations and experiences, gaining new competencies, building relationships, and assuming new roles.

13. the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills project 21st-century skills internationally into four broad categories: • Ways of thinking. Creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making and learning; • Ways of working. Communication and collaboration; • Tools for working. Information and communications technology (ICT) and information literacy; • Skills for living in the world. Citizenship, life and career, and personal and social responsibility.

14. dimensions of a 21st century education, and the related challenges for curricula: • Knowledge (a need to rethink the significance and applicability of what is taught, and in concert to strike a better balance between the conceptual and the practical); • Skills – necessity for education outcomes: higher-order skills (“21st Century Skills”) such as the “4 C’s” of Creativity, Critical thinking, Communication, Collaboration. • Character (behaviors, attitudes, values); • Meta-Layer (learning how to learn, interdisciplinarity, systems thinking, personalization, etc.)

15. Of all 21st century skills, creativity and innovation deserve a special mention: At the country, organization, and personal levels, the two have become the recognized hope for solving employability, personal, and societal crises. • Schools need to nurture creativity and innovation in their students, deliberately and systematically, and across all disciplines not only through the Arts.

20. The kind of education needed today requires teachers to be high-level knowledge workers who constantly advance their own professional knowledge as well as that of their profession. • Teachers need to be agents of innovation not least because innovation is critically important for generating new sources of growth through improved efficiency and productivity.

21. In the education sector innovation applied to both curricula and teaching methods can help to improve learning outcomes and prepare students for the rapidly changing demands of the 21st-century labor market.

22. What can teacher preparation programs do to prepare graduates who are ready to teach well in a 21st century classroom? The OECD’s comparative review of innovative learning environments concludes that, in order to be most effective, learning environments should: • make learning central, encourage engagement, and be the place where students come to understand themselves as learners; • ensure that learning is social and often collaborative; • be highly attuned to students’ motivations and the importance of emotions; • be acutely sensitive to individual differences, including in prior knowledge; • be demanding of every student, without overloading students; • use assessments that emphasize formative feedback; and • promote connections across activities and subjects, both in and out of school.

23. innovative learningenvironments • Teachers need to be well-versed in the subjects they teach in order to be adept at using different methods and, if necessary, changing their approaches to optimize learning. This includes content-specific strategies and methods to teach specific content. • They need a rich repertoire of teaching strategies, the ability to combine approaches, and the knowledge of how and when to use certain methods and strategies. • The strategies used should include direct, whole-group teaching, guided discovery, group work, and the facilitation of self-study and individual discovery. They should also include personalized feedback.

24. innovative learningenvironments • Teachers need to have a deep understanding of how learning happens, in general, and of individual students’ motivations, emotions and lives outside the classroom, in particular. • Teachers need to be able to work in highly collaborative ways, working with other teachers, professionals and para-professionals within the same organization, or with individuals in other organizations, networks of professional communities and different partnership arrangements, which may include mentoring teachers. • Teachers need to acquire strong skills in technology and the use of technology as an effective teaching tool, to both optimize the use of digital resources in their teaching and use information-management systems to track student learning.

25. innovative learningenvironments • Teachers need to develop the capacity to help design, lead, manage and plan learning environments in collaboration with others. • Last but not least, teachers need to reflect on their practices in order to learn from their experience.

26. The teaching profession in Europe: characteristics and challenges • The shortage of qualified teachers; • Gender imbalance; • The teaching force in Europe is ageing; • the drop-out rate of beginning teachers; • A lack of career-building prospects and relevant performance-based funding systems. • The low percentage of young teachers in schools today, apart from representing the global phenomenon of the aging population in Europe, also reflects a well-known reality: the teaching profession is still not very attractive to young people.

27. different factors affecting the role of teachers and the new competences required to display • curriculum reforms affecting pedagogy and didactics, • a new quality assurance culture emerging in schools.

28. New curricula, pedagogy and didactics • Core curricula designed at national level have been complemented by school-based curricula adapted to local needs. • Courses have been broken down into modules to provide greater flexibility. • The recent trend is moving away from learning objectives set for teachers, to designing curricula based on learning outcomes defined for learners. • competence-based or learning outcome-oriented curricula.

29. competence-based or learning outcome-oriented curricula • what a learner knows, understands and is able to do and the end of a learning process; • Learning outcomes are statements of what an individual learner knows, is able to do and understand following completion of a learning process. • In some countries, for example Germany and the Netherlands, the term competence is used instead of learning outcomes.

30. Some distinctive features of learning outcome–based compared to traditional curricula are: • the focus on learning that combines knowledge and skills with personal and socio-cultural competences; • knowledge is set in a context and is interdisciplinary; • focus on the labour market and employment requirements (traditional curricula sticks to the educational context and the body of knowledge to be transmitted); • learning is encouraged in a wide range of locations and by different methods.

31. member states often describe learning outcomes in terms of knowledge, skills and competence • Knowledge • The outcome of the assimilation of information through learning. • Knowledge is the body of facts, principles, theories and practices that is related to a field of work or study. • Skills • The ability to apply knowledge and use know-how to complete tasks and solve problems (...) skills are described as cognitive (involving the use of logical, intuitive and creative thinking) or practical (involving the use of methods, materials, tools and instruments). • Competence • The proven ability to use knowledge, skills and personal, social and/or methodological abilities, in work or study situations and in professional and personal development.

32. Learning outcomes approaches • Learning outcomes approaches reflect a constructivist view on the learning process and endorse research findings on how the brain works (Cedefop, 2010b; OECD, 2007). • The basis for obtaining new knowledge should be each learner‘s individual competences and experiences’. • Each learner must get individual attention, personalised work tasks and the opportunity to create and steer his own learning process. • Learning by doing is also a part of this pedagogy.

33. Learning outcomes approaches • It requires new forms of teaching, such as independent learning and integrated learning, project work, group work, peer learning and action learning. • Learning outcome-based curricula are more effectively taught in learning environments sensitive to individual differences. • New curricula incorporate generic skills and key competences, such as critical and creative thinking.

34. Learning outcomes approaches • Measuring these competences and attitudes is complex. It has required a rethink of traditional assessment tools in many European countries that are using or developing learning outcome-based curricula. • All these developments require systematic upskilling for teachers in new pedagogy and assessment methods and close collaboration between them, if it is learners to be benefited.

35. OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Every three years, it assesses how far students near the end of compulsory education have acquired some of the knowledge and skills essential for full participation in society.

36. Several member states discovered that in comparison with other countries, their educational systems did not produce the expected learning results. (In many countries, the first results from PISA in 2001 created a shock comparable to the Sputnik shock in 1957).

37. remedies to better the situation • to check learners‘ results regularly; • to better inspect teachers and ensure teaching quality by the way of quality assurance systems; • There is a current trend of teaching activities and learning outcomes to be transparent and possible to check for external actors. • Many European countries to date have introduced and implemented national quality assurance mechanisms in their educational systems based on different models; • Several countries have introduced new qualification requirements as well as systemic teacher training.

38. remedies to better the situation • The new commitment to quality and the extensive new ways of checking the performance of learners required for practitioners to spend more time on administrative tasks (planning, coordination and meetings) than before. • This created a need for displaying administrative skills like time management and organisational skills.

39. constant reforms, fast developments and increasing demands may negatively affect the well-being and professional identity of many educators • Teachers are concerned with the increased bureaucratisation in their profession which distracts them from their primary role: to spend time with the learners. • Others resist changes as they do not possess the skills or attitudes necessary to handle new demands. • Many teachers lose their motivation and question their professional identity when their main role is diluted and partly replaced by administrative chores, and when educating is substituted by facilitating learning.

40. Improving the Quality of Teacher Education (European Commission, 2007) (Common European Principles for Teacher Competences and Qualifications) • to make the teaching profession a more attractive career choice, • to improve the quality of teacher education and • to pay attention to initial education, early career support (induction) and further professional development of teachers.

41. common approaches • a trend to upgrade entry qualifications to the teaching profession; • regional actors are involved in the design of training programmers for teachers; • Many countries are reforming the initial education for teachers to an outcome-oriented approach in the form of declared knowledge, skills and competences; • minimum standards, competences frameworks, or professional profiles comprising professional, didactical and other core competences; • the introduction of induction programmes - the linking pin between initial education and in-service teacher training.

42. European Commission’s communication ‘Rethinking Education’ (2012) “revise and strengthen the professional profile of all teaching professions [by] reviewing the effectiveness as well as the academic and pedagogical quality of Initial Teacher Education, introducing coherent and adequately resourced systems for recruitment, selection, induction and professional development of teaching staff based on clearly defined competencesneeded at each stage of a teaching career, and increasing teacher digital competence”

46. The Commission’s document ‘‘Supporting the Teaching Professions’ (European Commission 2012) • Member States increasingly acknowledge the need to define clearly what teaching staff are expected to know, and be able to do; such frameworks of teacher competences can then be the basis for: • defining the learning outcomes of initial teacher education programmes, • defining criteria for recruitment and selection to teaching posts, • assessing teachers’ needs for in-service training , and • arranging the provision of professional learning opportunities so that teachers continue to develop their competences throughout their whole careers.

47. the document ‘Assessment of Key Competences in initial education and training’(European Commission, 2012) 8 key competences: the importance of transversal competences (digital, learning to learn, civic competences); the meta-competence of learning to learn (adjusting to change, managing and selecting from huge information flows); Teachers should understand, deploy and assess key competences; this entails interdisciplinary collaboration skills; Teachers should model these Key Competences as well as helping learners to acquire them.

48. the competences teachers require a specialist knowledge of the subject(s) they teach, necessary pedagogical skills (teaching to heterogeneous classes, making effective use of ICT, and helping pupils to acquire transversal competences).

49. the need to promote certain key professional values and attitudes amongst teachers: • reflective practice, • autonomous learning, • engagement in research and innovation, • collaboration with colleagues and parents, • and an involvement in the development of the whole school.

50. the document Supporting the Teaching Professionsfor better learning outcomes (European Commission, 2012) • teaching staff ‘will increasingly need the competences to find, evaluate and deploy learning materials from a wider range of sources’, • as well as ‘critical, evidence based attitudes, enabling them to respond to students’ outcomes, new evidence from inside and outside the classroom, and professional dialogue, in order to adapt their own practices’.