Mentoring as a strategy for empowering Education for Sustainable Development in schools

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is a demanding new field in terms of content and context and requires whole-school approaches and changes in educational structures. The field’s implementation constitutes a great challenge for teachers, novice in the field of ESD. Teacher education for ESD needs to effectively transfer knowledge and skills related to the concepts of sustainable development and reflect the relation of ESD to values education, systemic thinking and an interdisciplinary approach. The teaching methods employed by teacher education need to be in accordance with ESD methods and to empower teachers for integrating ESD in the teaching–learning process. For this purpose, we used a mentoring system to introduce experienced and newly appointed teachers, all novice in the field of ESD, to planning and implementing ESD and evaluated the potential of mentoring as a form of education for empowering teachers for ESD. Results highlight the value of mentoring since it encompasses all of the attributes that ESD teacher education requires in an experiential and practical form, it promotes teacher interaction and the formation of professional learning communities for ESD and it increases teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge of the subject. © 2013, © 2013 International Professional Development Association (IPDA)

Confidence and perceived competence of preservice teachers to implement biodiversity education in primary schools—four comparative case studies from Europe

This multinational research study was carried out between 2004 and 2006 in four teacher education institutions in Cyprus, England, Switzerland, and Germany. With the help of a written questionnaire, the confidence and perceived competence of preservice primary teachers (N = 690) to deliver biodiversity education in school were investigated. Data were triangulated with findings from a previous stage of the overall research project. Study participants' confidence to carry out certain outdoor activities in school increased with the number of similar experiences they had during their own secondary school education, and the more personal classroom experiences they had during their teacher education. A sound knowledge of local wild organisms strongly added to their confidence. However, preservice teachers' perceived competence, and thus motivation to implement biodiversity education later on in school, was related even more strongly to the extent of preparation they had received during their teacher education. The results indicate that teacher education programmes that focus exclusively on filling (biodiversity) knowledge gaps might fail to raise confidence and competence in their students to carry out biodiversity education in school. Programmes that have a higher possibility of attaining effectiveness in biodiversity education seek to strike a balance between background knowledge development, pedagogical content knowledge, and opportunities during teaching practice that leads to experiential gains in enacting meaningful activity sequences and engaging students in holistic educational innovations. Within such programmes, it would be fruitful to further explore the relationship between confidence, perceived competence, and actual teaching performance

Professional Development and Sustainability

The purpose of the current paper is to contribute to the overall effort (nationally and internationally) for raising the quality of the delivery of educational programs and redesigning ESD programs by evaluating the use of a "Rounder Sense of Purpose" (RSP) model, as a simple and solid model that supports and facilitates the development of ESD competence-based teacher education courses. The research took the form of a case study of an ESD teacher education program that aimed to scrutinize and transfer ESD competences to a group of educators in Cyprus. It explores (a) participants’ experience with ESD competences prior to the program, (b) their ideas and perceptions about how ESD competences support the ESD curriculum implementation, and (c) how RSP competences can help the development and delivery of a whole school ESD policy