Which Pedagogical Competences are Crucial for the Teaching Profession in the Eyes of Student Teachers?
Author(s):
Christoph Schneider (presenting / submitting) Rainer Bodensohn (presenting)
Conference:
ECER 2016
Network:
10. Teacher Education Research
Format:
Paper (Copy for Joint Session)

Session Information

10 SES 13 C JS, Developing the Assessment Capacity of Teachers and Intending Teachers: Theory and Practice (Part 1)

Joint Symposium NW 09 and NW 10 to be continued in 10 SES 14 D JS

Time:
2016-08-26
13:30-15:00
Room:
NM-F103a
Chair:
Sandra Johnson
Discussant:
Sandra Johnson

Contribution

Agreeing on a minimum consensus that teacher professionalization is not limited to providing teachers with professional knowledge but also with a number of competences including those needed to adapt to constantly changing needs (cf. Zeichner, 2014), potential outcome variables in teacher education research are manifold (Cochran-Smith et al., 2012). Following the logic of a ‘chain of effects’ of teacher education (Frey & Jung, 2011), teachers’ (and student teachers’) competences are important intermediate variables linking the ‘inputs’ of teacher education to outcome variables on the pupil level (such as gains in learning and achievement). While the call for competence orientation in teacher education is not a ‘new’ idea, but has already been raised decades ago (e. g. Dodl, 1973; Deutscher Bildungsrat, 1970), surprisingly little empirical research has specifically focused on teachers’ competences as outcome variables.

In order to evaluate (future) teachers’ competences, it is necessary to first agree upon which competence elements are crucial to the teaching profession. Although a number of EU member countries have, on a national level, issued standards for professional teacher acting, there is still no consensus on a European level (European Commission, 2012). It is our hope that, by exemplarily applying one national (German) set of standards for practical evaluation purposes, researchers from different countries may identify convergence in the contents of competence elements comprising essential teachers’ competences.  

Longitudinal monitoring of student teachers’ development of professional pedagogical competence is the focus of the KOSTA (competence and standard orientation in teacher education) project. In KOSTA, student teachers rated (amongst other aspects) the importance of a number of competence elements pertaining to the four broad domains of ‘teaching’, ‘education’, ‘assessment’ and ‘innovation’. The theoretical framework for monitoring specifically these four competence domains was provided by a normative collection of standards for teacher training issued by a national authority on educational matters in Germany (KMK [Secretariat of the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the FRG], 2013). Findings from KOSTA have been reported at earlier ECER conferences and in Schneider & Bodensohn (2014).  

In applying a normatively gathered system of standards and the structure of competences  proposed therein (namely the conception of the four abovementioned domains), it is necessary to investigate whether this four-domain-model holds true in empirical structural analyses of the student teachers’ importance ratings. A lack of overlap between the normatively proposed and the empirically determined structure of competences would indicate that in practical evaluation, student teachers are forced to look through glasses not fitting their proper vision. This would, in consequence, represent a threat to the validity of the competence ratings.

Based on findings in an earlier competence monitoring project (Schneider & Bodensohn, 2007) applying a different set of standards as proposed by Oser and Oelkers (2001), we expect that there is high agreement on which competences are important in the domains of ‘teaching’, ‘assessment’ and ‘education’. In ‘innovation’, however, we assume that some competence elements (e. g. the readiness to adopt and to incorporate evidence from research on teaching and learning into classroom teaching) might be perceived as comparatively unimportant. These competence elements, however, constitute a key feature in teaching in the 21st century: “So teaching staff nowadays also need the competence needed to constantly innovate and adapt; this includes having critical, evidence-based attitudes, enabling them to respond to students’ outcomes, new evidence from inside and outside the classroom, and professional dialogue, in order to adapt their own practices” (European Commission, 2012, p. 22f.). Thus, relatively low importances assigned to ‘innovation’ competences by student teachers, may ring alarm bells.

Method

In the KOSTA project, student teachers’ competences in the four domains of ‘teaching’, ‘education’, ‘assessment’ and ‘innovation’ were assessed twice in the course of the university-based phase of initial teacher education following two compulsory in-school practicums by means of students’ self-reports. In evaluating their pedagogical competences, students reported (a) the frequency with which they acted in accordance with each of the standards within the field experience they had just completed, (b) the overall importance for teaching they would assign to each standard an (c) the perceived quality of university training specifically towards the standards. In the second phase of the KOSTA project (KOSTA II), Nprim = 479 students pursuing a career as a primary school teacher, Nsec = 259 students pursuing a secondary school career and Nspec = 190 students to become special needs education teachers participated in the two waves of competence assessment. In this paper, the focus is set upon the analysis of the overall importance student teachers would assign to the standards (aspect b). In answering three subsequent research questions, the analysis strategy is threefold: 1. Which of the normatively set standards are most important in the eyes of the student teachers and which are seen as [comparatively] unimportant? (Descriptive analyses on the level of single standards) 2. Does the normatively proposed structure of four competence domains hold true in the student teachers’ ratings and do the subgroups of student teachers differ in their importance ratings? (Multigroup confirmatory factor analyses) 3. Is there a shift in the perceived importances of the competence domains in the course of the teacher studies? (Latent change models on the four competence domains)

Expected Outcomes

With regard to the three research questions raised above, results may be summarized as follows: 1. Descriptive analyses of the standards’ importances as perceived by student teachers show that across all competence domains, most of the standards are seen as ‘highly important’ or ‘important’. While a certain acquiescence effect in students’ ratings (“I am going to be a teacher, therefore I have to find this important”) cannot be completely ruled out, these findings appear quite encouraging. Going into detail, however, specifically standards of the ‘innovation’ domain are, as hypothesized, characterized as relatively unimportant. Possible implications of these findings will be discussed. 2. Multigroup confirmatory factor analyses show that a model with the four normatively proposed competence domains as correlated latent factors fits the data much better than a g-factor model or a second-order factor model. This indicates that there is no reason to assume that, by imposing this normatively derived model, student teachers are forced to look at competences through glasses which wouldn’t fit their view. Somewhat contrary to our expectations, there is no evidence for systematic differences in importance ratings on the level of competence domains between future primary, secondary and special needs education teachers. 3. In latent change models successively applied to the four competence domains, significant changes in importance ratings in the course of teacher education can only be identified in the ‘teaching’ domain (increase) and the education domain (decrease). Despite the respective parameters’ statistical significance, however, absolute change (less than 0.1 points on a six-point-scale) is practically negligible. Thus, importances perceived by student teachers remain on a high level throughout teacher education programmes. This may indicate that students who decided on a teacher career are quite aware of which competences actually matter in the teaching profession.

References

Cochran-Smith, M., Cannady, M., McEachern, K. P., Piazza, P., Power, C., & Ryan, A. (2012). Teachers´ Education and Outcomes: Mapping the Research Terrain. Teachers College Record, 114(100301), 1–49. Deutscher Bildungsrat (1970). Strukturplan für das Bildungswesen: Empfehlungen der Bildungskommission. Bonn (Verabschiedet auf der 27. Sitzung der Bildungskommission am 13. Februar 1970). Dodl, N. R. (1973). Selecting Competency Outcomes for Teacher Education. Journal of Teacher Education, 24(3), 194–199. doi:10.1177/002248717302400305 European Commission. (2012). Supporting the Teaching Professions for Better Learning Outcomes. Strasbourg. Retrieved from http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=SWD:2012:0374:FIN:EN:PDF Frey, A., & Jung, C. (2011). Kompetenzmodelle, Standardmodelle und Professionsstandards in der Lehrerbildung: Stand und Perspektive [Special issue]. Lehrerbildung auf dem Prüfstand, 4. Landau: Empirische Pädagogik. KMK [Secretariat of the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany] (2013). The Education System in the Federal Republic of Germany 2012/2013 (Excerpt). Retrieved from http://www.kmk.org/fileadmin/doc/Dokumentation/Bildungswesen_en_pdfs/teachers.pdf Oser, F., & Oelkers, J. (Eds.). (2001). Die Wirksamkeit der Lehrerbildungssysteme: Von der Allrounderbildung zur Ausbildung professioneller Standards ; Nationales Forschungsprogramm 33, Wirksamkeit unserer Bildungssysteme. Chur: Rüegger. Schneider, C. & Bodensohn, R. (2007). Fachkompetenzen in der Schulpraxis - Zur Bedeutung der Oserschen Standards professionellen Lehrerhandelns für den Berufsalltag und zur Kompetenzeinschätzung in Schulpraktischen Studien der ersten Phase der Lehrerbildung. In D. Flagmeyer (Eds.), Mehr Praxis in der Lehrerbildung - aber wie? Möglichkeiten zur Verbesserung und Evaluation (pp. 149–176). Leipzig: Leipziger Univ.-Verl. Schneider, C., & Bodensohn, R. (2014). Core competences of students in university teacher education and their longitudinal development: First results of the KOSTA study. In K.-H. Arnold, A. Gröschner, & T. Hascher (Eds.), Pedagogical Field Experiences in Teacher Education: Theoretical Foundations, Programmes, Processes, and Effects (pp. 147-163). Münster: Waxmann. Zeichner, K. (2014). The Struggle for the Soul of Teaching and Teacher Education in the USA. Journal of Education for Teaching, 40(5), 1–18. doi:10.1080/02607476.2014.956544

Author Information

Christoph Schneider (presenting / submitting)
University of Trier, Germany
Rainer Bodensohn (presenting)
Formerly University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany

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