Trends in teacher education across Europe: an initial analysis

This paper identifies three of the broad trends in teacher education across Europe, with some inevitably limited attempts to consider the resulting issues. This work is at an early stage of development so the reader may find some of the ideas presented here to be broad and general; it is a deliberate decision to present the work at this stage, even though I am aware of the considerable complexities underlying broad trends in policy and practice, particularly when these are transnational. I briefly outline these complexities at the beginning of this paper and intend to return to explore them further in later work. Other decisions made are around the focus and structure of the paper with the overall focus being on pre-service or Initial Teacher Education (ITE) rather than Continuous Professional Development (CPD) for serving teachers. This decision does not imply, of course, that pre-service is always more important than CPD; while pre-service programmes act as the foundation stones for teacher development, good CPD opportunities provide the continuity and progression of learning across the career-course, which are essential for career satisfaction and development. The chosen focus here then rather reflects pragmatic choices around what is possible in a presentation of this length. The paper, like the presentation on which it is based, first considers the background factors in policy analysis before moving to identify and discuss the trends in European teacher education. This choice of just three trends amongst the many patterns found in policy documents on teacher education across Europe is, of course, in the end, a personal one.

This chapter is based on an invited presentation at an International Seminar, held at Eszterházy Károly University College of Applied Sciences, Eger – Líceum on 7th September, 2015