Resumen de Acknowledging complexity: teaching practices at the core
Kathleen Feremans, Jan Elen, Ele Holvoet, Tim Christiaens
In 2007 the Flemish Parliament introduced a set of ‘Basic competencies for teachers”, that stated society’s expectations towards teachers. It quickly became used as a rigid set of objectives for teacher education programs. As each of the competencies have to be acquired and certified, they dominate the evaluation of student teachers. At the same time, the analytical nature of the list became criticized as it might not adequately capture the complexity and intricate nature of teaching (Ball and Forzani, 2009), nor the subjectivity and personality bound qualifications of a teacher.
In order to fully recognize the complexity of teaching in student teachers’ training, this project took the notions of “the inspired teacher” (Steele, 2009) and “core practices” (Grossman, Hammerness, McDonald, 2009) as a starting point. Rather than working on analytical competencies as objectives, this project aims at providing student teachers from the beginning with authentic tasks that mirror ‘core practices’. Hence, student teachers are from the start on confronted with the complexity of teaching and challenged to take ownership and accountability to study, enact, reflect, analyze and master the core practices (McDonald, Kazemi, Kavanagh, 2013). In this paper the relationship between core practices and the basic competencies will first be outlined. Next, evaluation practices will be discussed to highlight how basic competencies are actually acquired while at the same time considering the complexity of teaching.
By doing so we want to contribute to our understanding of how the complexity of teaching can be fully acknowledged in teacher training.
