Teacher Education

In traditional schooling, teachers’ work and the division of labor in schools are largely compartmentalized, segregated, and individualized. This presentation addresses the development of new forms of teachers’ learning and agency. To overcome deep constraints and built-in obstacles to collaborative self-organizing in schools, we need to break away from the closed, isolated expertise of a teacher working in a linear and vertical dimension, and move to a horizontally expanded, collaborative form of learning. In the presentation, I describe the results of a formative intervention research project for teachers’ lesson study meetings (teachers’ jointly reflecting on their own classroom lessons) in moral education at a municipal elementary school in Japan; the project was based on the framework of cultural-historical activity theory and the theory of expansive learning. These theories constitute a new form of pedagogy developed by Yrjö Engeström and his colleagues (see Engeström, 2008, 2015, 2016; Sannino, Daniels, & Gutiérrez, 2009; Sannino & Ellis, 2013). Research on activity-theoretical formative interventions to implement educational change attempts to facilitate practitioners’ own learning in generating innovations, and especially the collective creation of a qualitatively new system of school practice. We conducted a series of whole-school teachers’ lesson study sessions on moral education that reflect, one by one, on six classroom lessons representing each grade (the first to the sixth grade of elementary school). Each session is held by all teachers of the school after they observe a representative classroom lesson of each grade in moral education together. The analysis suggests that the process and cycle of teachers’ expansive learning actions in lesson study meetings at the school are characterized as trying to break through the fundamental contradiction between the authoritative implementation of moral education oriented to a predetermined order, on the one hand, and the democratic implementation of moral education oriented to open diversity, on the other. The findings of this presentation indicate that teachers can achieve expansive learning by collectively reflecting on their own existing practices and exploring future possibilities of transformation. This learning process entails rediscovery and long-term development of an expanded, shared object in new forms of activity.

In the world of teaching-learning, teacher empowerment is the professional development process which incorporates professional knowledge, teaching efficacy and decision making capacity. It also involves changes in mindset, relationship with others in organizational structure. On the other hand institutional effectiveness is the systematic and on going process of collecting, analyzing and acting on data and information to support the mission and goals of the institution as well as further progress.
Educational institutions unlike other organizations, tend to maintain continuously for ages blending tradition and innovation and it is the teachers who play the pivotal role. Thus teacher empowerment and institutional effectiveness can be considered as two sides of a coin. For women teachers, the issue of empowerment is more critical one as all over the world, the working women have to strike a balance between personal life and professional life, and eventually have to shoulder double responsibilities. Through this study an attempt is being made to study the role effectiveness of women teachers towards institutional effectiveness in university setup. To examine the factors like personal empowerment professional empowerment leading towards institutional effectiveness through a gender lens might help in exploring the causes, possibilities and reality issues relating to university women teachers.
The two major objectives of the study are as under :
1. To study the level of empowerment of women teachers.
2. To study the role effectiveness of women teachers towards institutional effectiveness.
A sample of 102 women teachers from two state universities in Assam, India has been selected for the study. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches will be used in order to get a holistic picture.

While the intensity and complexity of teachers’ work have increased significantly over recent years, teaching remains fundamentally a caring profession, focused on nurturing others and requiring high levels of social skills and emotional labour to successfully engage and motivate students, as well as maintaining effective relationships with the broader school community.  Teachers need well-developed, sustained resilient behaviours to thrive in these environments.  School-based professional experience plays a critical role in the resilience of preservice teachers. Professional experience is described as the most significant learning event in teacher education as well as the most stressful component. This paper adopts a social-ecological lens (Ungar, 2012) to explore how the reciprocal interactions between preservice teachers and their professional experience contexts influence preservice teacher resilience.

Preservice teachers (n=67) enrolled in a graduate-entry teacher education program in eastern Australia participated in this qualitative study with data collected via four questionnaires administered to the cohort over a twelve month period. The questionnaires identified the range of personal and contextual resources and strategies that the cohort drew upon to meet the demands of professional experience. This paper will discuss several key findings. First, the preservice teachers’ emerging teacher identities were adaptable and responsive to the challenging workloads and expectations of classroom teaching. However, we argue that the rapid adaptation to the complex demands of the teaching environment should be viewed with some caution. Second, while strong and trusting relationships are central to teacher resilience (Mansfield et al., 2016), the classroom and school contexts offered inconsistent resources and support. The cohort’s substantial personal resources assisted them to effectively reframe and adapt their developing teacher identity and self-activate resilient behaviours during the classroom experiences. Throughout the reciprocal interactions with schooling contexts during professional experiences, the pre-service teachers demonstrated highly agentic behaviours with consistent evidence of self-initiated resilient behaviours (Mansfield, et al., 2016).  In light of our findings, our presentation will put forward several recommendations for teacher education and schooling contexts and for future research.