LITERATURE REVIEW: TEACHER EDUCATION

Teacher Education



Teacher Education

Teacher education is increasingly facing many challenges as it responds to the changing international nature of educational systems. The processes of training and enhancing teachers' performance through teacher education are under scrutiny. What should these processes include? What are the best methods? Processes of modeling that reflect current pedagogical practices seem to be important, and in this issue, the papers by Sung and de Leon-Carillo consider the links between what pre-service teachers believe and how they operate as developing teachers in the contexts of pre-service teacher education programmes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA) and the University of Santo Tomas (Manilla, the Philippines) respectively. As well, there are questions concerning how we develop and maintain professional aspects of teachers' work and how this might be enhanced in the future. The concept of collaboration and mutual support to enhance teachers' reflections is discussed in two papers. The paper by Greene, Kim, and Marioni describes the collaborative reflective processes used by three teacher educators and how, through their explicit modeling of reflective practice, their students favorably viewed this process. Lee's paper discusses how Korean English teachers found it difficult to work together to enhance their knowledge.

Perhaps the biggest issue facing teacher education is its image in the public arena. Cushman's article considers this from the perspective of the shortage of male teachers not only in New Zealand but also internationally and considers how the fragile image of teaching needs to be changed if we are to address the biased profile of the teaching profession. Possibly, ideas about what pre-service teacher education programmes should include is very strongly linked to the perceptions of what education systems need to provide and what is good teaching and learning in particular contexts.

These perceptions may be influenced by the current worldwide education crisis that is linked to compliances with core curricula, pressure, audits, consultations, and experimental new ideas (Greenfield, 2004).

Also, shifts in teacher education may possibly reflect the changes associated with society becoming more dependent on knowledge management and on the more highly valued skills related to innovation and enterprise (Gilbert, 2005). Also, there is likely to be an increased emphasis on developing critical discourse on the emerging social and political influences on education (Greenfield, 2004).

At the same time, there is a challenge concerning how to design schooling that is likely to be more globalised, localized, and individualized than it is now (Gilbert, 2005). A challenge for any education system in the future will be how these factors will influence the way learners think and perform and how the consequent changes to learning, teaching, and teacher preparation will accommodate these changes. In New Zealand's schools, as in many schools internationally, teaching and learning experiences are interactive - students contribute and share their ideas amongst themselves in small groups as much or even more than they share their ideas with their teacher. The mode of delivery of pre-service teacher education, therefore, tends to model these teaching and learning processes by providing small group interactive experiences for trainee teachers where possible links are made between appropriate pedagogies and learning theories...