There has been much attention to the role and nature of standards in the context of teaching  (Kleinhenz & Ingvarson, 2007) and teacher education (Cumming & Jasman, 2003; Delandshere & Petrosky, 2004). Central to many discussions is the view that standards set an expectation of competence and aspiration for excellence and, as such, are essential for the professionalization of teaching. However, a standards approach to education has also been widely criticized. Criticisms include: teachers’ loss of pedagogical autonomy and authenticity through the promotion of performativity and ‘impression management’, a reductionist approach to teaching and restricted definitions of teaching presented in standards, the perilous dualism of performance and formalized knowledge within the standards, and the absence of attention to  the complexities of teaching in standards (for example Yinger & Hendricks-Lee, 2000).

In spite of the critiques, graduating teacher standards remain a prominent feature of the policy environment in many countries in Europe and beyond (David, Estefan, Kotschy, & Falus, 2012; Liakopoulou, 2011). For this research, we began by outlining the ongoing discourse around standards for teacher education and depicting the challenges of writing standards in initial teacher education. We then examined the role and nature of current graduating teacher standards in 13 international contexts with the aim of understanding how standards for teaching graduates might be most effectively designed to support high quality teaching. The guiding research questions were:

1. What characterizes the nature, content and organization of graduating teacher standards?
2. To what extent do graduating teacher standards support their purpose?
3. What limitations are evident in existing approaches to graduating teacher standards?

The findings from these research questions revealed that, in spite of their espoused purpose and acknowledgement of context, existing standards do not capture the complex, context-bound, and active nature of teaching. This led us to propose an alternative design of graduating teacher standards aimed at addressing limitations we identified across European and international contexts in existing standards documentation. In designing these standards we drew on the literature on effective teaching, and particularly on the key features of the approach to teaching that is variously referred to as reflective thought (Dewey, 1933), inquiry-as-stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), teacher-as-researcher (Stenhouse, 1975), reflective practice (Schon, 1983), teacher as an adaptive expert (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005), and teaching as inquiry (Laurillard, 2012; Sinnema & Aitken, 2011).

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