Policy, Teacher Education and the Quality of Teachers and Teaching

This edited collection brings together papers written by a number of experienced international academics who share a passion for promoting research-informed, high-quality pre-service and in-service teacher education that makes a positive difference to the lives of teachers andtheir students. Taken together, the contributions to this book represent a call to arms for all who lead education policy at local, regional, and national levels, teacher educators, and schools themselves, to engage in sustained and productive collaboration. Topics include: the centrality of empathy to the classroom, ‘practical theorising’ that is a central part of all good teachers’ armoury; the possibilities for collaborative professionalism which enables them to extend and enrich their thinking, commitment, and capacity for resilience; the pedagogical reasoning, habits of mind, critical reflection, knowledge, and skills that lead to the best classroom practices. Only when the voices of stakeholders at all these levels are brought together, heard, and enacted, are students in all schools in all contexts and in all jurisdictions likely to receive the quality of education to which all are entitled. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Teachers and Teaching.

Introduction: Policy, teacher education and the quality of teachers and teaching Christopher Day 1. Empathy, teaching dispositions, social justice and teacher education Robert V. Bullough Jr 2. Pedagogical reasoning: the foundation of the professional knowledge of teaching John Loughran 3. Teacher candidate learning of action-oriented knowledge from triggering incidents in teaching practice Auli Toom, Mikko Tiilikainen, Lauri Heikonen, Äli Leijen, Juanjo Mena and Jukka Husu 4. Teachers and teaching in China: a critical reflection Leslie N.K. Lo 5. The Universities and initial teacher education; challenging the discourse of derision. The case of Wales John Furlong 6. Changing policy contexts and teachers´ work-life narratives: the case of Estonian vocational teachers Ivor F. Goodson and Meril Ümarik 7. Teacher collaboration: 30 years of research on its nature, forms, limitations and effects Andy Hargreaves

Christopher Day is Professor of Education and Member of the Centre for Research on Educational Leadership and Management (CRELM), University of Nottingham, UK. He is also Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Sydney, Australia, and Chair Professor of Educational Leadership at Beijing Normal University, China.