It’s a common practice in teachers’ preparedness for the job to involve field experiences, where student teachers provisionally work at schools and deliver actual lessons to real life learners ("The Design of Teacher Education Programs," 2005). To this day, such exposure to the fundamental aspects of the teaching job such as interaction with learners and lesson planning, falls short from preparing teachers adequately to a real teaching context with its interwoven and growing responsibilities and obligations (Southgate, Reynolds, & Howley, 2013). In today’s life, teachers’ engagement in activities outside classroom is equally important to classroom activities. Besides teaching, teachers are encouraged to cooperate effectively with peers, contribute to different intraschool and interschool activities and build a sound parent-teacher relationship, to name but some of the modern demands of teaching (Zeichner, 2010). These expectations are broadly referred to as ‘knowledge, skills and values’ of teaching (Karen Swabey, 2010) and specifically as ‘teaching standards’ and ‘teaching competencies or competences’ (OECD, 2013). 

In line with the international trend, largely known as ‘back to schools’ movement (Ronfeldt & Reininger, 2012), all three teacher education colleges in the United Arab Emirates have incorporated advanced school-based courses into their teacher education programs. In the past, the major problem with teaching in the UAE was the unfamiliarity with the modern pedagogical models, whereas obtaining intensive knowledge of the subject content was the anchor of teaching institutions. Student teachers would spend a large proportion of their studies learning the bases of the subject that they are expected to teach, not how the subject should be taught or how to adapt its content to the context. Unalike most countries, the problem with teaching in the UAE, in particular, is of two folds; shortage of national teachers as the majority of teachers are expatriates (Tim Martin, 2008) and the quality of teaching. This study tackles one aspect of the latter; the preparedness level that student teachers acquire during field-training. 

Taking in account previous work in this area, we hypothesise that the perception of teaching and its related competences may determine new teachers’ level of readiness for the job (Jeanne M. Allen 2013). Also, we will test the probability of identifying different levels of new teachers’ readiness for the job as a consequence to the variation of practical approaches between different teacher education institutions (“The Design of Teacher Education Programs,” 2005; Ronfeldt & Reninger, 2012).

By conducting surveys, each participant in the study, was asked to fill out a ‘readiness for the job Likert scale’ to reflect the key competences based on their personal experiences and individual views. The study looks into providing evidence-based data on the nature of teaching competences in the context of the government institutions in the UAE and to what extent they are dealt with in teacher education programs. Most importantly, it explores the fundamental competences that underpin the curricula of teacher education in the UAE; it provides information as how those competences are introduced, implemented and modelled to student teachers. We will try to establish a link between the attainment of such competences and the level of readiness for teaching (Karen Swabey, 2010). The significance of this project lies in that no study up to date, in the UAE, has anticipated the performance of soon-to-be teachers in view of pursuing teaching competences.

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