Teacher education futures: today's trends, tomorrow's expectations

Education is facing significant political and contextual challenges that will impact its future. This study employs a Delphi methodology to investigate teacher educators' views of current trends and their consequences for teacher education futures. Interviews were conducted with a sample of expert teacher educators drawn from eight countries. This provided international perspectives on both local and global trends. The data were analysed to identify and elaborate key themes reported by the participants. The article draws on these themes to develop brief narratives around current developments that the teacher educators argue will have a major impact on the future of teacher education. These narratives are used to develop possible scenarios to inform thinking about teacher education futures. © 2013 Teacher Development

Distributed leadership as a factor in and outcome of teacher action learning

This paper reports an evaluation of Quality Teaching Action Learning (QTAL) projects conducted at New South Wales (NSW), Australia public (state) primary and secondary schools and explores how distributed leadership facilitated and was an outcome of the QTAL projects.The evaluation encompassed all 50 projects at 82 NSW public schools, and nine of these schools were selected and visited for case study by members of the evaluation team. Data were provided through individual project progress reports, journals, interviews and case studies. Schools used funding provided under the Australian Government Quality Teaching Program to release teams of teachers to undertake approved Quality Teaching Action Learning Projects using the NSW model of pedagogy as a framework. Projects were broadly successful in achieving their aims and distributed leadership and teacher learning were important factors in project planning, implementation, and success. Projects resulted in enhanced distributed leadership and leadership capacity in the schools and provided a foundation for further professional learning and change. Conditions facilitating and hindering action learning, distributed leadership, and educational change are highlighted. Copyright 2008 by the INTERNATIONAL ELECTRONIC JOURNAL FOR LEADERSHIP IN LEARNING

Enhancing teacher education practice through professional learning conversations

The paper discusses the value of peer observation followed by professional learning conversations for the professional development of teacher educators. The authors analyse their shared learning experiences and articulate what challenged them in these experiences. They discuss the ways in which their perceptions of this process differed or were similar. The grounding of the experience in a context of trust and professional relationship was seen as an essential part of the learning process. The authors highlight the importance of the cognitive-emotional and personal-professional aspects of teacher educators' lives in supporting their learning through the combination of peer observation and ongoing professional learning conversations. © 2008 Association for Teacher Education in Europe

Mobilising collaborative teacher professional learning

© 2009 IADIS. This paper reflects on the role of m-learning in teachers' professional learning. It argues that effective professional learning requires reflection and collaboration; and that m-learning is ideally suited to allow reflection-in-action and to capture the spontaneity of learning moments. The paper also argues for the value of collaborations between teachers and students in professional learning. It suggests that authentic artefacts and anecdotes, captured through mobile technologies, can enable the sharing, analysis and synthesis to improve classroom learning environments. Opportunities fro usercreated content are discussed as well as ethical issues that might arise through using mobile technologies in this way. Practical, school systemic, attitudinal and ethical factors may inhibit m-technology adoption; these factors need to be researched and addressed to realize the potential of teacher mobile professional learning

Why school students choose and reject science: a study of the factors that students consider when selecting subjects

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Student study of science at school has been linked to the need to provide a scientifically capable workforce and a scientifically literate society. Educators, scientists, and policymakers are concerned that too few students are choosing science for study in their final years of school. How and why students choose and reject certain subjects, including science, at this time is unclear. A Best–Worst Scaling (BWS) survey was completed by 333 Year 10 (age 14–17) students to investigate the relative importance of 21 factors thought to impact students’ subject-selection decisions. Students ranked enjoyment, interest and ability in a subject, and its perceived need in their future study or career plans as the most important factors in both choosing and rejecting subjects. They considered advice from teachers, parents or peers as relatively less important. These findings indicate that enhancing students’ enjoyment, interest, and perceptions of their ability in science, as well as increasing student perceptions of its value in a future career, may result in more students studying science at school

Mobagogy- mobile learning for a higher education community

This paper reports on a project in which a learning community of higher educators was formed to investigate how best to use mobile technologies in their own learning and teaching. Activities of this group included investigating best practice approaches by interviewing experts in the field, exploring the literature on mobile learning and then initiating and testing some mobile learning pedagogies in the context of their own higher education subjects. The community met regularly to discuss emerging issues and applications. The paper shares some of the findings gained both from the expert interviews and from the experiences of members of the community, and discusses the challenges and constraints that were experienced. We conclude with recommendations for promoting mobile learning communities in higher education. © 2010 IADIS

Retaining effective early career teachers in NSW schools

This project was commissioned by the NSW Department of Education and Training. This four and a half year research project had the aims of tracking a cohort of final year (2005) preservice teacher education students through their post-graduation experience into 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009, in order to understand more clearly the reasons why some early career teachers (ECTs) in NSW public schools choose to leave the profession, and why others choose to remain; and in order to develop strategies to increase the retention rate of effective teachers during their early years of teaching

Exploring teacher pedagogy, stages of concern and accessibility as determinants of technology adoption

© 2017 Association for Information Technology in Teacher Education. This research examines how the pedagogical orientations of teachers affect technology adoption in the classroom. At the same time, the authors account for the stage of concern that teachers are experiencing regarding the use of the technology, their access to the technology and the level of schooling at which they teach.The authors’ investigation of these factors occurs in the context of a contemporary technology, the interactive whiteboard (IWB), in Australian schools. A structural equation model was estimated using a reflective measure of technology usage with antecedents in the form of pedagogical-oriented beliefs and best–worst scaling derived scores for a teacher’s stage of concern regarding IWBs. Teachers with constructivist-oriented pedagogical beliefs were significantly more likely to use IWBs than transmission-oriented teachers. However, the strongest determinant of usage was whether the technology is immediately accessible or not