Following the profound reformation approaches of the 2000s and early 2010s teacher education in Germany is still facing a multi-perspective mission of coping ongoing transformations. In the aftermath of re-thinking teacher education as an impact of the PISA-studies, competence-orientation and the implementation of the Bologna process, German policies started to interrogate the reformation activities facing the difficulties of measuring education policies in relation to political approaches of certain outcome variables e.g. numbers of graduates in teacher education in front of the ongoing demand of new teachers. In 2014 “The Teacher Training Quality Campaign (TTQC) of the Federal Government and the states” (“Qualitätsoffensive Lehrerbildung”) is the largest innovation funding of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in teacher training in Germany after the Second World War. The TTQC does not basically aim to establish a new overarching standard in the teacher education system. The intention is specifically aimed at the contents of teacher education in the universities focusing academic professionalization processes in terms of curricula developing and establishing new forms of collaborative studies within the teacher education subjects (Gehrmann, 2018). Simultaneously, teacher education is obligated to response certain crisis situations like the teacher shortage on the labor market as a rapidly growing issue of the current decade. Interplaying factors of political governance, demographic fragmentation of the labor market and a long-term professionalization concept most German states are facing a widespread teacher shortage enforcing the teacher education stakeholders to implement new qualification and employment concepts in order to provide sufficient workforce in schools (Bárány, Gehrmann, Hoischen & Puderbach, 2020). While the TTQC is aiming a substantial promotion of existing structures of teacher education the teacher shortage is evoking fundamental changes within the system at least temporarily. With concepts of “Lateral Entry” or “Second Career Teacher programs” teacher education is exposed to an extensive transformation pressure with apparently contradictory perspectives of professionalization approaches. Since 2017 the federal state of Saxony implemented a qualification model for second career teachers embedded within the structures of formal teacher education representing the largest program of non-traditional pathways to the teacher profession currently. Taking the example of the TU Dresden the paper introduces the fundamental concept of this unique form of teacher education, it will provide selected data from the qualification practices and is going to discuss the potential impacts on the traditional structures of teacher education taking the overlaying approaches of the TTQC into account.

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