This is the English language contents page for E&SD 14(3)
Selected papers from the International Forum on Teacher Education (IFTE) 2019
Ilshat Gafurov, Roza Valeeva, Aydar Kalimullin
Editorial: teachers’ professional development in global contexts. 6
Zdenka Gadušova, Alena Haškova, Ľubica Predanocyova
Teachers’ professional competence and their evaluation. 17
Manpreet Kaur, Balwant Singh
Teachers’ Well-Being: An Overlooked Aspect of Teacher Development. 25
Branka Radulović, Olivera Gajić, Svetlana Španović, Biljana Lungulov
Challenges of initial teacher education in the context of higher education reform in Serbia. 34
Elisabeth Windl, Johannes Dammerer
Teacher Training in Austria with special consideration of Mentoring in the induction phase. 40
Janina Uszyńska-Jarmoc, Monika Żak-Skalimowsk, Beata Kunat
Creativity and Need for Cognition in Students of Pedagogy. 48
Manuela Keller-Schneider, Uwe Hericks
Beginning Teachers’ Appraisal of Professional Requirements and Implications for Teacher Induction in Switzerland. 62
Sameena Aziz
Are Madrassa and Mainstream School Educational Practice and Teacher-Pupil Relationship Mutually Exclusive? British Muslims discuss the influence of education institutions on their emerging identities. 80
Violeta Rosanda, Andreja Istenič Starčič
A review of social robots in classrooms: Emerging educational technology and teacher education. 93
Valerian F. Gabdulсhakov, Stella G. Grigoryeva, Catherine G. Krivonozhkina, Guyzel Sh. Zakirova
Strategic technologies for pedagogic education in universities.107
Gasangusein I. Ibragimov
Methodology of Research-Oriented Training in the Teacher Education System.117
Olga G. Smolyaninova, Julia V.Popova
Teacher competence deficiencies in the use of mediation technology in education.127
Nadezhda A. Sayfullina, Rosa A. Valeeva
Predictive competence of future educators: a review of the current state of the problem.140
Alexander G. Bermous, Vladimir A. Kirik
Development of local educational standards as a strategy for the modernization of teacher education.150
This special edition presents a snapshot from around the world of the current
state of the research devoted to the issues of professional development of teachers.
Teachers’ professional and pedagogical activity is significantly changing today (Teacher
education in a time of change, 2016). In many respects, these changes are explained by
a new understanding of the purpose and result of education, which is formulated in the
documents of educational reform in Russia and in the world, in the context of achieving
a new quality of mass education (Valeeva & Gafurov, 2017). The question that becomes
extremely important is: “How exactly should the teacher’s professional and pedagogical
activity change in order to provide a new quality of education meeting the “challenges
of the time?”
The reform process of Slovak system of education requires a professional discussion aimed at
enhancing the quality of the teacher’s professional performance in the context of the pupil’s needs
and overall optimization of the education system, including qualitative changes in the content
and organization of education as well as a change in the social status of teacher. One of the topics
discussed was the possibility of increasing the quality of the teacher’s performance by mapping
them to the requirements of the teacher’s professional competency profile. A team of experts from
Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra (Slovakia) has been addressing this issue in the
form of a research project Evaluation of Teacher Competences, which focuses on the development
and design of a comprehensive evaluation model and tools for evaluating different teaching
competences.
The research team has developed special evaluation tools – a set of assessment sheets aimed at
assessment (Assessment Sheets for evaluators), self-assessment (Self-Assessment Sheets for
the observed and evaluated teachers), and a tool to correlate the assessment positions of the
evaluator and the evaluated teacher. In developing the tools, the specific focus of each professional
competence and the content and performance requirements on teacher’s work have been taken
into account. The methodology for verifying the efficiency of the designed tools included panel
discussion, piloting, and personal interviews. The results of the pilots in primary and secondary
schools all over Slovakia were analyzed, evaluated and taken into account when modifying the
final version of the evaluation tools. These are now offered for implementation by school managers
in Slovak schools.
One of the issues in the research project, testing the process aspect of education, is the competence
of planning education. The research, focused on identifying the complex of the given competence
components and their analysis. The most important part of the competence is the ability to create
a model (plan/scenario) of a lesson, the success of which is based on the correct identification and
realization of the educational aims and objectives. The teachers demonstrate competence through
their ability to implement relevant didactical transformation of the curriculum content, not only
in the view of the requirements of particular subjects, but also in the view of the current societal
challenges and needs, taking into account modern and effective methodological approaches. The
assessment tools for the competence in educational planning were verified in a pilot. The paper
presents partial results of the research, which confirmed the relevance and reasonability of the
methodology for the competence assessment. Education and training requirements in the Slovak
Republic accept common aspects related to the education of citizens of the European Union and
at the same time prioritize education as an essential means for ensuring sustainable development.
Achievement of these goals can be ensured not only via transforming the Slovak school system, but
also via teachers’ personal, professional and career growth.
Teachers are the most crucial factor in the education system and are responsible for students
’achievement, satisfaction and well-being. Thus, teacher well-being has utmost importance for the
success of education. This is the report of an exploratory study which draws on the experience of
50 secondary school teachers randomly selected from different schools of North India. Key questions
include 1) what is well- being?) 2) what are the various factors affecting teachers’ well-being? and
3) how we can enhance teachers’ well- being through professional learning activities?
The Well-being Index (WHO-5) was used to assess the level of well-being of teachers. It was found that
65 % (32) teachers scored low on this scale. Semi- structured interviews were also conducted to find
the factors affecting well-being of teachers. The study indicated that relevant factors are individual,
relational and also external. Results revealed that both the institution and the teacher are important
in maintaining and improving well-being. Teachers’ well- being is not an individual’s responsibility
only but requires that schools, society and other stakeholders of education should work together to
plan activities for improvement of teacher well-being at pre-service stage and professional learning
programs. The study also showed that initiating a continuous focus on teachers’ well-being might be
the best way to provide fertile ground for teacher’s personal and professional development.
In the last few decades, many European countries have introduced changes in the regulation of
education and higher education systems, accepting the provisions of the Bologna Declaration. The
purpose of this declaration is to create a single European Higher Education Area with comparable
and compatible academic standards and quality assurance standards across Europe. Serbia
subscribed to these changes in 2003 reforming its higher education system in accordance with
the declarations. Study modules have been reformed with the aim of achieving higher quality and
more applied knowledge of students. The changes that have taken place have been reflected in the
fundamental goal of an initial teacher education to create quality graduate teachers who are able
to ensure high quality learning outcomes for all the children and young people with whom they
work. The aim of this paper is to examine the effects and the challengies of initial teacher education
in the context of higher education reform in Serbia. The changes that have occurred need to be
seen from three angles: the initial education being implemented in several faculties within the six
state universities; professional teacher training and self-evaluation and quality management of the
teaching process. In the Republic of Serbia initial teacher education is realized in several forms. The
primary form of initial teacher education is carried out at teaching faculties while the secondary
form of initial teacher education is through the training of teachers, which is regulated by law. Some
of the difficulties faced by initial teacher education programs are: the competitiveness of teaching
careers with other careers that are better paid. The results in a lower student response, but also affects
the funding of the teaching faculty itself. Taking into account the importance of education and its
impact on society, it is necessary to monitor changes in the field of teacher education continuously
and systematically in order to find ways to overcome various challenges and difficulties.
Teacher training courses are currently being restructured not only in Austria but throughout Europe.
This involves a qualitative and a quantitative expansion of practical school studies. In Austria, in
addition to practical school experience during training, an induction phase is to take place after
completion of studies, in which young teachers are accompanied by a mentor.
Mentoring in the induction phase as support for career entry offers many opportunities, but
also requires careful implementation. This article points out possible challenges and theoretical
approaches.
The aim of this research was to evaluate the relationship between the level of creative thinking in
pedagogy students and their internal need to learn about the world and themselves. A quantitative
research strategy was employed. The research sample numbered 250 participants. The questionnaire
Need For Cognition Scale – NCS was used to measure the need for cognition (NFC). The Test
for Creative Thinking, Drawing Production – TCT-DP, test sheets A and B were used to measure
creativity. The results of the research revealed the existence of relationships between creativity
and the need for cognition in pedagogy students. The analysis enabled an outline of the directions
in which university education might develop in order to foster students’ need for cognition as a
precondition for creative activity. Finally, the study delineated the limitations and perspectives for
future research.
Beginning teachers are challenged by a new complexity of requirements they have to meet by
entering their career as a newly graduated and fully responsible teacher. Despite of experiences in
pre-service teaching and the focus on combining theory and practice during teacher education in
Switzerland, further professionalization is needed to master the whole complexity of demands. Based
on the Lazarus transactional theory of stress and coping, professional requirements are perceived
individually different. Developmental tasks for beginning teachers were identified, but teachers
perceive and solve them in different ways. Depending on individual resources of the teachers, such
as knowledge, beliefs, motives and goals, personality traits, coping strategies, health and emotions,
teachers experience professional requirements differently. An induction program for beginning
teachers after their final graduation as a teacher must be designed according to individual teachers’
needs, allowing a flexible use of several offers, based on different didactical settings.
The purpose of the article is to investigate beginning teachers’ appraisals of professional requirements.
The questions are, which professional requirements are challenging, how competent teachers feel
to master them and how relevant they are for them. In addition, based on the wide spread of the
challenge perceptions, different types are identified and analyzed, to determine whether they differ
in their appraisals of competence and relevance.
The main methods used are statistical analyzes (confirmatory factor analyzes, descriptive statistics,
cluster analyzes with subsequent discriminant analyzes, variance analyzes and T-Test) on teachers
data, collected by a questionnaire.
The article shows how teachers appraise the relevance of professional requirements, how competent
they feel dealing with them and how challenging they perceive the experience. In addition, different
types of challenge were identified to investigate, whether they differ in their competence and in the
relevance of these professional requirements.
Based on the results of this study it is obvious, that teachers are challenged by requirements and
that they need phase-specific opportunities to foster their further professionalization. Derived from
the types of perceived challenges, it is significant that such programs should be used on demand
and with a focus on the concerns of the individual teacher, including metacognitive strategies. For
further professionalization it is crucial that the elements of an induction program do not focus
only on mastering professional requirements, but on reflection on strategies to master them in a
professionalization- and health-supportive way.
This paper presents the findings of a study exploring the attitudes, experiences and relationships of
Muslim youth with their madrassa (supplementary school) and mainstream school teachers in the
backdrop of British government’s intense scrutiny and regulatory practices of educational spaces
occupied by Muslim youth.
This study further explores the perceived pedagogy used in both educational contexts and its influence
on the growth and development of the learners. British Muslims discuss how they negotiate their
identities against a normalised societal narrative dictating diverse cultural, religious and secular
educational contexts as conflicting polemics culminating in Muslim youth leading segregated lives.
The research was conducted in a small inner city, through an independent measures design
involving two groups of 22 participants, current and ex-madrassa pupils, aged 11 – 19. Interpretative
Phenomenological Analysis of the data revealed that over the past ten years there has been a change
in the attitudes of British Muslims towards their madrassa and school teachers. Due to the repetitive,
impersonalised rote learning pedagogy inculcating little meaningful knowledge; the harshness and
punitive nature of teachers and limited teacher-student engagement the ex-madrassa pupils held a
stronger relationship with their mainstream school teachers. In contrast the current pupils preferred
their madrassa teachers describing them as ‘fun and kind’. School teachers are perceived to develop
them as wealth producing capital and madrassa teachers as inculcators of moral character, laying the
foundations for becoming a better human being.
British Muslims discuss the changing nature of their madrassa teachers from overseas, to homegrown
British educated imams, helping to contextualise their understanding of Islam to their lives
in Britain and now more recently to online tutors with British teaching qualifications. They compare
these with professionally trained school teachers.
This evidence-based small-scale study identifies, through the voices of British Muslim youth, that
school and madrassa education does not have to be mutually exclusive. Through mutual sharing
of teacher training, pedagogy and curriculum planning, schools and madrassas have the potential
to homogenise the learning experiences helping Muslim youth inscribe their religious identities
within a secular pluralistic British society. This paper provides British Muslim youth a platform to
voice their felt experiences and make recommendations for madrassa teachers and leaders; school
teachers and leaders and policy makers.
The 21st century is the age of robots, an age in which we are witnessing the development of social
robots for education. In the future teachers will be required by the labour market to prepare students
for work with robotic technology and co-work and interact with robots. Initial teacher education
needs to follow the development of robots and prepare students and teachers in applying robotic
technology in teaching. In the review study, we aim to identify how robotic technology is applied in
classrooms on different educational levels and subjects. We performed a review of the Web of Science
Database for the period between 2006 and 2018. The analysis categories included: the educational
level and research participants who experienced social robot activities, subject areas, outcome
types and robot-learner interaction time. We also examined the research design and publication
source. Findings indicate that the educational-pedagogical aspects in the studies often represent
more a vehicle, rather than a final goal of integrating robots into teaching practice. The studies
reviewed focus mostly on mixed human-robot interaction (HRI) and educational-pedagogical
outcomes. Robotic learning activities are prepared in the function of research goals, and not for
the introduction of robots into regular teaching practices. They engage a small number of students
in a diversity of learning contexts. Robot-learner interaction takes place primarily as a unique
experience or as several short-term ones, during fragmented activities that rarely approach the time
unit of the lesson. Robots carry out short, detailed tasks in classrooms for which lengthy studies and
preparations have been required. The novelty of this work is in focusing also on (1) The demarcation
between the focus of studies on educational-pedagogical outcomes; educational-pedagogical and
HRI outcomes; HRI outcomes; (2) study of the robot-learner interaction time dimension.
The purpose of this study is to identify a set of strategic and effective technologies of pedagogical
education in a university on the basis of the analysis of the problems of teacher training. The research
methodology is based on Hamel’s concept of ‘core competence’. This concept involves the analysis
of management strategies based on a matrix of significant problems. The study used methods
of questioning, interviewing, analysis and comparison, methods of summarizing the results of
statistics, and learning outcomes. According to Prigozhin’s typology, the problems can be divided
into embedded, socio-cultural and situational, and the wording of the problems are classified as
denominative, causal and antithesis. On the basis of the matrix obtained from this analysis, we
define the set of technologies of pedagogical education; psychological and pedagogical conditions
of realization of technologies at the level of baccalaureate, pedagogical master’s degree program,
and professional retraining of workers of education. The organizational and pedagogical model of
realization of technologies in the conditions of a classical university is developed. The results are
implemented in practice through the curriculum, programs of professional retraining of the Kazan
(Volga) Federal University.
There is a contradiction in the system of pedagogical education between on the one hand, the
objective demand for research-oriented training as a mean of forming research competence among
graduates of pedagogical magistracy, and on the other, their lack of readiness for the design and
implementation of research-oriented training due to the lack of development in didactics goals,
principles, forms, methods and means of designing such training. This study aims to develop and
justify the methodology of research-oriented training in the pedagogical education system. We
hypothesized that the effectiveness of research-based learning will increase if the process of its design
and implementation is based on a system of knowledge about the methodology of training and
the essential features of research-based learning. The study had three objectives: 1) to identify the
essence and content of the concept of “methodology of training”; 2) to show the main characteristics
of research-oriented training in the pedagogical education system; 3) experimental testing of the
methodology of research-oriented training of undergraduates in the pedagogical education. The
research methods included the theoretical analysis of scientific and pedagogical literature on the
problem, generalization, transfer, abstraction, modeling, empirical testing through pedagogical
experiment, and methods of mathematical processing of empirical data. The research shows that
research-oriented learning in the modern pedagogical education system is formed as an independent
didactic system, which has grown on the basis of the theory of problem learning and is aimed at the
formation of students’ research competence. The methodology of research-oriented training in the
pedagogical education system is the doctrine of the organization of research activities of students,
including a system of knowledge about its logical (features, forms, methods, tools) and time
structure (phases, stages, stages). Implementation of research-oriented training in accordance with
the methodology proposed in the study contributes to the effective development of undergraduates’
research competence of “Pedagogical education. The study can inform researchers in the field of
pedagogy and teachers of higher education, and to improve the development of students’ research
competence, as well as teachers in secondary schools.
Introducing mediation in teacher training is becoming one of the priorities in educational policy.
Mediation is a modern pedagogical technology aimed at responsible positioning of the actors
in conflict with the educational process and creation of a safe learning environment. This study
contributes to promoting mediation practices to resolve conflicts. The difficulties of introducing
mediation were identified on the basis of content analysis of reports on mediation procedures in
Krasnoyarsk schools. Theoretical analyses and expert surveys made it possible to identify deficiencies
in teacher training in the implementation of mediation technology for conflict prevention
and resolution at all levels of education. The article presents the analysis of the key professional
competencies, obtained from a survey of practicing expert mediators in Krasnoyarsk, comparing
them with similar international studies. It identifies the gap between society’s needs for professional
competence in this area and the existing level of competence of practicing teachers and mediators.
Teachers need be able to work in the constantly changing conditions of the educational space. It is
not enough to know a significant amount of information : the teacher must adapt the information
to educational practice , to be mobile and farsighted in the educational space , to anticipate
possible changes in it and to build a learning process based on scientific forecasts . The teacher
needs prognostic competence . The aim of this article is to determine the extent to which of the
phenomenon of predictive competence has been scientifically elaborated and to identify modern
approaches to its study and formation . The study concentrated on a bibliometric analysis of
modern pedagogical research on the most popular databases : “Scopus “, “Web of Science “, “Elibrary”
to identify approaches from modern foreign scientific research.
This identified the relevance of more in-depth studies of the specifics of the complex formation of
prognostic competence. For students and undergraduates, this component has distinctive features
that have not yet been subjected to comprehensive study. The finding of the study can be used in the
preparation and training of teachers in universities and institutions of secondary education.
The article addresses the problem of developing educational standards to ensure effectiveness,
quality, comparability and resource development. One of the most important tools for
solving these problems is to develop local educational standard for a federal university. The
development and implementation of these standards can have an important systemic effect on the
development of a regional system of pedagogical education. The article presents the draft of the
local educational standard of the Southern Federal University in the areas of teacher education.