Teacher educators undertake complex work yet often lack sustained, structured opportunities to engage with deliberate, practice-embedded professional development. This paper introduces a collaborative professional learning programme to build a shared understanding of identity, pedagogy and context. Preliminary results reveal tensions between multiple roles and expectations, including the caring/wellbeing dimension of teacher education; classroom-related as well as wider systemic constraints; and multifaceted ways of viewing student teachers.
This study develops the teachers' life skills integration self-efficacy scale to measure pre-service teachers'perceived self-efficacy in integrating life skills into core subjects. Data were collected from two samples of pre-service teachers in India (n1 = 292, n2 = 293). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis confirmed a three-factor structure: instructional strategies, classroom management, and evaluation. The scale demonstrated strong content validity, with Cohen's Kappa statistic (k*) values across items ranging from 0.72 to 1, indicating excellent agreement among experts. The findings amplify the noteworthiness of estimating pre-service teachers' life skills integration self-efficacy, providing practical implications for improving teacher training in life skills integration.
We examined Professional Learning Communities in university settings and their association with teacher job satisfaction. The findings revealed that Professional Learning-Academic Communities (PLACs), 1) were negatively associated with job burnout and positively contributed to job satisfaction, and 2) served dual roles that aligned with the Job Demands-Resources model. These results suggest that PLACs can be considered valuable for promoting teachers' job satisfaction.
This study addresses a critical gap in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) pre-service teacher education: the need for structured training in critical affective civic literacy (CACL) to equip future educators to navigate the challenges of heightened immigration and political polarisation. Focusing on a cohort of 49 pre-service EFL teachers in Madrid, this research assesses their baseline empathy (both general and specific towards irregular immigrants and refugees) and evaluates their attitudes towards adopting video-based CACL practices. The study examines the readiness of these future educators to foster intercultural understanding and act as agents of change within their classrooms. Findings reveal that participants possess high levels of empathy, particularly regarding immigration, and overwhelmingly support integrating these practices into their future teaching. They identify video-based CACL methods as vital for enhancing learners' empathy by fostering critical thinking, affective engagement, and intercultural awareness.
This research employed a nested mixed methods design to develop the spatial ability self-report and visual literacy efficiency of pre-service teachers through orienteering. The quantitative dimension used one-group pre-test-post-test design, expanded by qualitative data collection tools. The study group consisted of nine participants studying at the Faculty of Education, determined by criterion sampling and convenience sampling methods. The research employed data collection tools including the Spatial Ability Self-Report Scale (SASRS), and Efficiency of Visual Literacy Scale (EVLS), along with questionnaires, field notes and observations. The quantitative findings indicated a statistically significant increase in the participants' scores offering concrete evidence that orienteering is effective in developing pre-service teachers' spatial ability self-report and visual literacy efficiency. The themes derived from the qualitative data support this increase, revealing that orienteering strengthens map reading, environmental engagement, and orienteering skills. This research recommends that interdisciplinary activities based on experiential learning are incorporated into the curriculum in teacher education programmes, to support mathematics and language skills.
