In both Australia and Malaysia where there is strong central oversight of education, reflective thinking is promoted as integral to an effective pedagogy that leads to good quality learner outcomes. Besides providing tools and resources for teachers and pre-service teachers to use, increasing the systemic procedures for teacher advancement and…

The Ministry of General Education (Zambia) introduced subject specialisation at primary school. However, researchers have not yet sufficiently interrogated the concepts and modalities of subject specialisation at the primary school level to build a basis for an informed position and implementation. The paper aimed to review the literature and…

The notion of employability has become a focal point of higher education in many countries' strategies to prepare students for employment. Responses to this notion can differ largely from country to country and from university to university, based on their historical, political, and economic contexts. However, very little has been researched in…

Purpose: The paper aims to examine, within the context of professional practice and learning, how designers collaboratively working in international teams experience practice-based learning and how such occasions contribute to professional development. Design/methodology/approach: The paper introduces the cooperation project between Tibro Training…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine instructional leadership (IL) in outstanding secondary schools within a centralised (Greece) and a partially decentralised (England) education context. Design/methodology/approach: Since the purpose of the study is exploratory, the researchers adopt a qualitative approach, employing a series of four…

Despite a broad consensus on the ethical dimensions of the teaching profession, and long-standing efforts to align teacher education with wider trends in professional education, little is known about how teacher candidates are being prepared to face the ethical challenges of contemporary teaching. This article presents the results of an…

Recent reviews of vocational qualifications in England have noted problems with their restricted nature. However, the underlying issue of how to conceptualise professional agency in curriculum design has not been properly addressed, either by the Richard or the Whitehead reviews. Drawing on comparative work in England and Europe it is argued that…

Professional library education in New Zealand and Australia has developed independently, with different structures for entry-level qualifications. Both countries face challenges in continuing to offer high-quality programmes, in part due to the distribution of students relative to the providers. This paper outlines the LIS qualifications and…

This volume contains selected papers submitted to the 20th Jubilee Annual International Conference of the Bulgarian Comparative Education Society (BCES), conducted virtually in June 2022. The 20th BCES Conference theme is "Towards the Next Epoch of Education." The theme is focused on problems, discussions, changes, solutions, and…

Proposals made by the European Commission in 2007 led to the Education Council adopting, for the first time, a European agenda for improving the quality of teaching and teacher education. This article reports on a small-scale longitudinal interview-based study with teachers in England, Norway and Germany demonstrating that while opportunities for…

In recent research, it has been argued that effective professional learning would continue over the long term and is best suited for a school community that promotes learning. This requires an examination of the teachers on a daily basis. In order to develop such a community, it becomes increasingly important for teachers to mutually observe and…

This article discusses particular aspects of current Canadian teacher training that seem healthy practice to an experienced school-teacher from the United Kingdom. With the UK government increasingly interested, some would say determined, in moving the funding of initial teacher training away from universities and to schools, my visit to Canada,…

To disclose the inner process of teacher educators' dealing with their different roles and their coping with conflicting demands, the study of dilemmas encountered in practice may offer a promising perspective. Building on previous research on teaching dilemmas, this study uses a comparative approach to disclose teacher educators' views on…

The issue of teacher effectiveness has risen rapidly to the top of the education policy agenda, and the federal government and states are considering bold steps to improve teacher and leader effectiveness. One place to look for ideas is the experiences of high-performing education systems around the world. Finland, Ontario, and Singapore all have…

Much has been written about the education policies and practices that countries and schools are putting in place. At the other end of the spectrum, accountability systems and assessments such as the Program for International Student Assessment shed light on the results that are achieved. Much less is known, however, about how policies and…