Educational systems are very much influenced by their respective national settings, historical developments as well as cultural notions of good teaching. Yet, at the same time, there seems to be a global trend towards a standard-based teacher education system (cf. Ertl 2006). Combined with an attempt to globally define the knowledge and educational values that teachers and students should know (cf. Tatto 2007), teacher education systems are being critically analyzed, with respect to their efficacy and sometimes even with respect to their mere existence, as the rise of alternative teacher education programs in particular in the US shows. Since the late 1990s, new approaches to the reform of teacher education in the US have been under way. Professional communities such as the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) or The National Board of Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) attempt to define the characteristics of good teaching, are searching for standards for the practice and performance of student teachers. The advocates of the so-called professionalization agenda (Zeichner 2003) demand higher standards for the admission to and for classes within teacher education pro-grams as well as stricter teacher certification and licensure. In Germany, the results of the international studies in student achievement (PISA, TIMS) and subsequent reforms profoundly shaped the educational discourse in Germany similar to the waves of shock triggered by the report “A Nation at Risk” in the US in 1983. A new, more output-oriented perspective on the German educational system is currently being developed, one that is counter to the belief that assessment of learning as well as teaching methods and styles are determined solely by the judgment of teachers (Ertl 2006). This paper argues for a common thread in the German and US-American educational discourse on the professionalization of teacher education. One aspect of comparison is the call for reflection. This poses several questions that need to be answered: what is reflection and can it possibly be empirically analyzed? How can students be prepared to be reflective? Which content areas that students reflect upon should be covered in teacher education?

In order to investigate these questions, two case studies were conducted that explore teacher education systems from two angles (Germany and the US) by analyzing program settings at two universities in which concepts of reflective thinking are implemented to enhance the professional development of pre-service teachers. In these teacher education programs, small empirical research projects serve as a means to enhance students’ reflection on the basis of classroom research, in line with the tradition of the reflective practitioner (Schön 1983, 1988) that bases his/her teaching decisions “on rational argumentation in addition to everyday or intuitional argumentation” (Kansanen 2006, p. 11). Data collection of this study includes students’ reflective journal entries, a content analysis of program documents, field notes and semi-structured interviews with teacher educators. What is also included in this case analysis is a target-performance comparison of teacher educators’ expectations towards students’ reflection.

Although comparisons bear the danger of blurring differences, this paper attempts to discuss two teacher education systems that seem to be very different, yet share common aspects in the binational discourse on professionalization as well as on reflection. From a higher education teaching perspective, best practice examples for a suitable learning setting will be provided that help students to develop a reflective-research attitude. In addition to a mutual discourse on professionalization, some recent developments in the US may soon enter the German discourse as it is the case with the emergence of alternative teacher education programs like Teach First Germany. Finally, this paper will call attention to the fact that the consequences of this new development are difficult to predict.