Knowledge, Policy and Practice in Teacher Education

A Cross-National Study

Maria Teresa Tatto, Ian Menter, Maria Teresa Tatto, Ian Menter

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350068704
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

Knowledge, Policy and Practice in Teacher Education reviews the evolution of education policy on initial teacher education as an indicator of the knowledge that is considered important for nation building. It also looks at research on approaches and structures to initial teacher learning as an indication of the intellectual and moral direction to which schooling must aspire. Contributors look at these dynamics across a range of societies including Australia, the Czech Republic, England, Finland, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, and the USA. Using a review of the literature approach within a comparative framework, the book seeks to answer the following questions for each country:
What has been the evolution of different approaches to learning to teach in each setting, and what factors have influenced change over the years?
What are the underlying theories that characterize past and current thinking about the knowledge, skills and dispositions needed by teachers and what evidence is used to support these theories?
What does a review on the state of the knowledge about teacher education over the past 30 years reveal about the evolution of the research and knowledge traditions that have supported current and past innovations in teacher education? Maria Teresa Tatto and Ian Menter explore international variability in different conceptions of knowledge in the context of learning to teach and explore the way in which national and international influences interact in the developing trajectories of teacher education policy and practice, considering what knowledge is considered important for teachers to have.

Part One

Setting the Scene

1

Understanding Teacher Education Policy and Practice Cross-Nationally

Maria Teresa Tatto and Ian Menter

Introduction

The forces currently challenging university-based teacher education are strong and have managed to transform, in some cases drastically, teacher education in a number of countries (e.g. Chile, England, Mexico, Pakistan and the United States) in a movement that allows the market to determine the future of education at all levels. While to a degree there is awareness of the changes that are occurring in teacher education internationally, it is important to understand the speed and the kind of changes that are occurring at the institutional and curricular levels. It is essential to know how these changes are likely to affect the knowledge and capacities of future teachers, and whether mandated changes are informed by research and empirical evidence, or whether they are largely dictated by ideological and political forces.

This book is a product of a collaborative project of the Learning to Teach: Building Global Research Capacity for Evidence-Based Decision Making International Research Network (IRN) sponsored by the World Education Research Association (WERA). The project brings together a group of international education researchers whose goal has been to engage in a cross-national exploratory study using an historical perspective and a review of research approach. We asked contributors to describe pivotal changes in the evolution of teacher education in their native countries, and to examine the research literature to determine how existing research evidence has been used to guide teacher education transformation and how or whether scientific knowledge has informed the theory and practice of teacher education in each nation.

We sought to identify common features that distinguish distinct approaches to learning to teach across settings and cultures and to examine whether current policies and practices are supported by research and/or empirical evidence. By engaging in this work, we aimed to create capacity to engage in new research directed at exploring methods and strategies in preparing future teachers and supporting current teachers throughout the career life cycle with emphasis on the subjects that teachers teach and on the needs of teachers who practise in challenging contexts.

The WERA-IRN ‘Learning to Teach: Building Global Research Capacity for Evidence-Based Decision Making’

The Learning to Teach: Building Global Research Capacity for Evidence-Based Decision Making network was formed in 2014 to address three main objectives, all of them to be pursued through international and comparative perspectives and methods:

• Historical overview of how teacher education has developed in each context;

• Examination of the institutional, knowledge and research traditions that have influenced or been influenced by the evolution of teacher education in different national contexts;

• Analysis of the research and other factors within each country that have influenced the form and direction of teacher education.

Strand 1: Historical overview

We aimed to cast a wide net to recruit collaborators to develop a multi-context review of the evolution of institutions, knowledge and research traditions on learning to teach in their home cultures. The key question guiding the charge to authors was as follows: what evidence has supported different approaches to learning to teach in your country and how has this evidence changed, if at all, over the years? This broad charge was intended to provide indicators of the ways in which societies value particular and perhaps distinctive types of knowledge and how these choices have influenced teaching and learning to teach.

Strand 2: Theory, knowledge and research traditions

We also charged our authors to document the underlying theories that characterize past and current thinking about the knowledge, skills and dispositions needed by teachers and to examine the evidence used to support these theories. While more knowledge is needed to examine programs’ theory-of-action in comparative perspective (Weiss, 1997), we consider this one timely step in a larger research agenda. We have urged the chapter authors to examine and make visible the underlying concepts explicit and implicit in the ways in which teacher preparation has been conceived and implemented in their home cultures (see also Whitty and Furlong, 2017).

Strand 3: Empirical evidence

We charged authors to review the state of knowledge about teacher education in their home nations beginning in 1980 (when major reforms and insights about teacher education began to become internationally visible) and continuing to the present. Authors used ‘backward mapping’ to chart the evolution of the research and knowledge traditions that supported current and past innovations in teacher education to answer questions such as: How are teachers prepared across countries? What evidence exists that these approaches result in the preparation of knowledgeable and capable teachers? Does the research literature point to common features of effective teacher education across countries and contexts? Does university-based teacher preparation provide unique opportunities to learn to teach vis-à-vis other approaches? Is strong content knowledge necessary and sufficient to become a good teacher? What is the role of pedagogical content knowledge and other knowledge forms acquired in partnership between teacher education programs and schools? How have strong accountability and standardized testing trends in a growing number of national, regional and local school systems affected teacher education? What has been the influence of globalization on the education of teachers including the introduction of market-based reforms? We asked authors to summarize in their chapters those studies they saw as ‘indicative’ of the type of studies undertaken. In some cases authors were able to refer to early literature reviews and entire handbooks of research on teacher education, while in other cases no such tradition of research existed. In these cases, position papers and historical documents summarizing policy positions were used.

To achieve these purposes we have met annually at WERA meetings beginning in 2014 to discuss the stated goals, and to report on progress and challenges in undertaking this work. While we extended an invitation to collaborate to more than twenty colleagues in different countries, many could not engage in the work for various reasons including lack of funding or institutional support, difficulty in accessing databases and lack of published research that could be used to answer the questions posed. A follow-on book is planned, using the same template, to include more countries and more regional variety.

Those who collaborated on this book represent twelve nations: Australia, the Czech Republic, England, Finland, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, the Russian Federation and the United States. Each author or team of authors provides a valuable account of teacher education and its evolution in their context and influential examples of the research and practical work that needs to be done to improve teacher education in their setting.

Approaches to literature review and analysis using cultural, social and historical lenses

Developing a description of the historical development of teacher education and of the knowledge traditions that have guided the field was a challenging but an achievable task. Our third goal, identifying the empirical literature that could point to common features of effective teacher education across countries and contexts, proved more elusive. Because our attempt was to explore these questions across the countries represented by our IRN, we began by identifying the broad consensus among thought leaders in the field of teacher education about what knowledge is needed for good teaching and how teachers can best learn that knowledge (e.g. what opportunities to learn are provided to future teachers) in each country context. It soon became evident that the notion of ‘good teaching’ was variable and situational within and across countries, resulting in the conclusion that there is no definitive research that defines how teachers learn the required knowledge to teach effectively across levels and subjects. It became clear that the notion of effectiveness is contested across societies and contexts and that while the question ‘How do teachers learn to teach effectively?’ is seen as important to pursue; to answer it we needed to follow a two-stage process.

First, we recognized that our work could not speak to the policy debates about what is effective teacher education because we could not judge whether the research in each nation had empirically identified effective teaching practice, much less effective teacher education. Therefore the questions we need to ask are as follows: What does the research say about what makes teachers good teachers? What is the professional knowledge that good teachers should possess? What knowledge claims have been researched? How strong is the evidence, and of what quality? If there is no persuasive research available on a nation’s school teaching or teacher preparation programs, where do cultural ideas of what a good/effective teacher is come from? These became the questions we attempt to address in this book.

The reviews of empirical research therefore sought to address the following:

a. What knowledge claims about what makes effective teacher education are supported in each nation? How central/extensive is this work and how much consensus is there?

b. What knowledge claims about what makes teacher education effective are contested or have had mixed or contradictory empirical results. Why are these claims to teacher education effectiveness contested and what are the main points of contention?

c. After comparing nations, we can identify which claims about enabling professional expertise are ignored or non-existent in specific nations. This meta-summary of national reviews will show whether or not research exists on what effective teacher education is, what is the quality or depth of the field, and what is missing. This could then propel the next phase of the work, in which we would seek to influence the development of policy from an empirical research base.

Contribution of the methods used in this study and insights of interest to researchers and policymakers

Our work is first and foremost collaborative and capacity building (see Tatto, 2011, 2017). The literature review guidelines were developed in collaboration with representatives of the participating countries. The collection of the documents and the search of the databases were done by researchers within each country with guidance from the core research team. The participating scholars recruited their own research teams and guided the studies in their countries. The intention was to work collaboratively with all participants to sift and assess evidence-based knowledge on teacher education relevant to their own settings.

Throughout the work we met frequently virtually and face to face, and recruited authors in a significant number of countries. Regular progress reports from our colleagues received frequent rounds of review. We presented our work in two Symposia at the 2016 WERA conference in Washington, D.C.¹ , where we also held discussions that enriched the study and gave it new direction ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Part One Setting the Scene
• Part Two Country Cases
• Part Three Emergent Themes
• Index
• Copyright