This study examines team-based simulations (TBS) as a school-embedded approach to promoting teacher resilience from a socio-ecological perspective. Twenty primary school teachers participated in TBS sessions within an action-research design. Data comprised teacher-generated scenarios and discussions, personal reflections, and textual/visual metaphors. We conducted thematic analysis guided by a socio-ecological framework, with defined units of meaning, iterative coding, and procedures for analytic rigour. Teachers routinely encountered challenges in interactions with parents, pupils and colleagues, alongside substantial pedagogical and organisational demands. Findings indicate the development of resilience skills across personal, interpersonal and organisational layers, underscoring the pivotal role of the school context in fostering capacity. The metaphor analysis added depth, illuminating teachers' cognitive and emotional experiences; metaphors clustered around growth, connectivity, and perspective shift, mirroring the multi-level development seen in discussions. We conclude that TBS offers a practical pathway for developing resilience in situ, enabling participants to act as both creators and learners of their professional practice. Conceptually, the study advances understanding of teacher resilience as capacity-in-context, situating development within the organisational life of the school rather than as an individual trait alone.
This study examines how instructional teams are enacted in clinical simulation-based learning (SBL) in teacher education and how their functioning is shaped by organizational conditions. While prior research has focused on discrete components of SBL, such as facilitation or acting, less is known about how these elements are coordinated. The study adopts a qualitative embedded case study design, drawing on data from 19 simulation center directors, including written reflections, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups. Data were analyzed thematically from a cognitive perspective on meaning-making. The findings address two interrelated dimensions. First, instructional teams were enacted through three core processes: coordinated alignment of roles, relational coordination and trust, and distributed mediation of learning. Across cases, learning was not attributed to individual roles but to the extent to which facilitation and acting were mutually responsive and sustained across interaction and interpretation. Second, the functioning of instructional teams was shaped by organizational conditions, including stability of collaboration, opportunities for joint professional development, and ongoing managerial mediation, which enabled or constrained the coordination of roles over time. The study contributes to a system-level conceptualization of mediation in teacher education, positioning instructional teams as the primary unit through which professional learning is produced in SBL.
Programming activities provide learners with opportunities to implement both computational and mathematical thinking while developing abstraction, which lies at the core of both domains. Although abstraction is fundamental to both computational and mathematical thinking, it is conceptualized and interpreted differently in each, as explained below. This study examines changes in level of abstract thinking among 41 pre-service elementary school teachers as they use the Scratch environment to produce animations in sequence of six tasks. These tasks were designed to provide repeated opportunities for abstracting proportional relations, including direct and inverse relations between motion and time. To analyze the data, we defined three levels of abstraction that capture these relations in the scripts of each task. We examined the extent to which pre-service elementary school teachers’ scripts demonstrated shifts in levels of abstraction across the sequence of programming tasks. The findings reveal gradual shifts in pre-service elementary school teachers’ levels of abstraction for both direct and inverse relations. This study extends prior research on the relations between computational and mathematical abstract thinking by focusing on proportional relations and offering a novel approach for assessing levels of abstraction in programming.
