Walter Geerts & René van Kralingen - The Teachers' Handbook

TheTeachers’ Handbook

is not sufficient. Results from countries with a long-standing tendency to employ underqualified teachers are not very hopeful. It appears that after several years these unqualified teachers can mainly be found at lower-quality schools. Typical ly, they end up at schools with unfavourable conditions characterized by minimal personnel requirements (Ingersoll, 2005). Teaching credential So what does work? Attending a teacher training institution and earning a teach ing credential? Or first testing the water by jumping in at the deep end? Experi ence shows that the latter generally does not make a good teacher. Theoretical knowledge is essential but will not suffice. As a teacher you certainly need to possess superior knowledge compared to your students. In addition, you need the right tools to cope with differences among students and classes. However, theory only becomes meaningful when successfully put into practice. Accord ingly, the future teacher should search for an optimal way to combine theory and practice. In the end, what counts is not solely your acquired knowledge but also your ability to put it into practice. A theory can only be considered sound if it proves workable for you. Teachers’ personal qualities also play a key role since they mainly determine to what extent new insights, beliefs, ideals and competen cies eventually take shape in the classroom. The professional preparation offered by educational institutions assumes an important role by teaching students how to put generic knowledge into practice. Education and practical experience It is remarkable that teacher training institutions only really started to value prac tical experience towards the end of the 1990s. These days, it is common practice for student teachers to teach independently in the field for about fifty percent of the time in the final years of their studies. In order to ensure the practical side gets thoroughly explored, schools join forces to support projects like ‘training at school’. Currently, teacher training institutions as well as schools offering in ternships seek to collaborate. In another variety of training, students attending teacher training programmes do research, supervised by teacher researchers, for school development purposes. Teacher education and development requires both teacher training and field ex perience. If all goes according to plan, questions will arise from the field with re spect to designing test items, composing lesson plans and developing algorithms, etc. These tend to be important questions, which we believe should be more frequently tackled by teacher trainers in cooperation with their students. This requires curriculum adaptations: no predefined career education programmes should be in place but rather ‘electives’, which should be chosen by you as a fu ture teacher. Supervisors in the field should in turn approach their students more rigorously and send them to a teacher training institution with specific learning

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