Abstract

Chasing the good teacher education

Jens Rasmussen

Aarhus University, Denmark

Governments around the world are showing teacher training strong and vigorous attention these years. Teacher training is high on the education policy agenda for a number of reasons. The overall reason is a serious concern for global competition on the knowledge-economic market. Increasingly education has become an economic parameter in the knowledge economy, where compulsory education plays a decisive role as the first step in society’s knowledge-economic food chain.

This seen in relation to strong documentation for teachers’ effectiveness as the single most important factor in improving educational outcomes sharpens demands to teachers’ education. To this can be added concerns with shortage of teachers in the near future because in many countries large cohorts retire. It becomes a challenge not only to attract a sufficient amount of applicants to teacher training programs but also to attract applicants from the group of best performing students of high school graduates.

All of these challenges are met differently in different countries. This can be seen from the fact that initial teacher education varies significantly across countries. From a comparative perspective and studies this presentation will take a deeper look into the topics dealt with in teacher education programs and teacher education reforms in top-performing countries like Canada, Finland and Singapore on the one hand and the Scandinavian countries on the other.