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Education systems, and especially teachers across Europe, all face common environmental, sociodemographic, as well as digital challenges on a daily basis.

These challenges require a cohesive international response in teacher education to find and establish widely accepted European solutions. Since education is primarily structured at the national or federal level, with limited international influence on school systems, there is a need for overarching guidelines that can be adapted across diverse educational systems, classroom practices, organizational structures, and subject-specific approaches. Only such guidelines can provide a truly European perspective on education.

We explored an international perspective on how different European countries have addressed, and maybe even solved some of the challenges, to offer teacher educators — and by extension, teacher students and in-service teachers — insights on the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required to teach cross-cutting issues, along with examples of good practice from European classrooms and universities.

The TESTEd project

The ERASMUS+ Teacher Academy project "TESTEd – Towards a European Syllabus in Teacher Education: Facing future challenges together" was conceived in June 2022 with an international and intersectoral consortium consisting of five universities and a continuous professional development (CPD) provider as well as 11 schools, and critical friends (education administrators, government representatives, teachers’ unions, and other stakeholders) as associated partners from central, north, and southwest Europe.

Overview of TESTEd consortium

As a cornerstone in preparing future generations, the importance of education cannot be overstated. Teachers all around Europe strive to support students in acquiring the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary for achieving well-being, as well as sustainable, fruitful, and meaningful lives. With challenges such as climate change, the rapid irruption of technologies, and the general uncertainty circling over European democracies, teachers find themselves in a key position to address these pressing issues in their classrooms. However, with these challenges becoming even more wicked and complex, some teachers feel insufficiently prepared to tackle them on their own.

This pressure to quickly adapt to a rapidly changing world of complexities is reflected in teacher education practices. In TESTEd we asked ourselves if teachers were being sufficiently equipped with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that they need, and decided to step in to support teacher and school communities to address five key cross-cutting issues:

1. Education on sustainability
2. Democratic education and fostering active citizenship
3. Diversity and equality in gender and sexual identity
4. Multilingualism in teaching and learning
5. Digitalization of learning environments

These cross-cutting issues and related competencies are highlighted in different frameworks and initiatives in the European Union. Thus, the integration of these themes into teacher education is vital to promote teacher competence, and further, student competence in confronting the most urgent needs in Europe.

About the Syllabus

Development process

This Syllabus is an outcome of the TESTEd consortium. The Syllabus was developed based on various sources from national and international organizations. We reviewed guidelines and reports regarding teacher education and the five cross-cutting issues from each partner country and from the European Commission, the Council of the European Union and other international organizations. From these reviews, we identified similarities and differences among the participating countries.

For developing teacher competence, we looked closely at the documents from international initiatives, such as the Key competence for lifelong learning, GreenComp, DigComp, DigCompEdu and OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030. These initiatives and competencies frameworks were used to identify overarching competencies to be developed in 21st century education. For instance, OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030 which interplay with various competencies identified in this Syllabus.

The competencies presented are structured adopting the KSA (knowledge, skills and attitudes) model used in the Key competence for lifelong learning. We also conducted an extended expert survey and thematic expert meetings for each of the cross-cutting issues. We received 53 responses in the survey, which helped us develop the initial version of the Syllabus. In the thematic expert meetings, we engaged in in-depth discussion about the experts’ views on the Syllabus, collected feedback and further refined the framework.

The prototype of the Syllabus was implemented and validated in different TESTEd activities, including roundtables, CityLabs, two iterations of a joint lecture series for student teachers, two Makerspace events applying the knowledge into practice, two continuous professional development courses for in-service teachers, as well as a research exchange initiative for including scientific perspectives.

Structure of the Syllabus

The Syllabus consists of seven sections: five sections on the cross-cutting issues, a section on methodology and an overview of the teacher competencies. Each section, that focuses on one of the five TESTEd cross-cutting issues, consists of the following sections.

1. Definition of the main concept: This section explains how TESTEd sees and frames the cross-cutting issue. The text includes links to a glossary of main concepts at the end of the document.
2. Emerging key topics: Three emerging topics which indicate gaps between current practices at school, and the needs in the society, are identified. Each emerging topic includes a proposed set of teacher competencies and activity examples. Teacher competencies consist of knowledge, skills and attitudes illustrating requisites to integrate the emerging topic into teaching. The implementation examples showcase ways in which teachers can deploy the competencies in the classroom.
3. Good practice examples: Throughout the text, there are highlighted boxes with more detailed examples of good practice with open educational resources (OERs). We reviewed 149 OERs related to the five cross-cutting issues, and presented the 15 good practice examples with OERs which were most relevant for the emerging topics. OERs include classroom activities, materials, whole-school actions, projects, or documents that we identified as exemplary ways to integrate the emerging topics into teaching.
4. References

Apart from the cross-cutting issues, the Syllabus also contains a section on methodology to promote teaching practices that embrace the complexity through phenomenon-based, multi-perspective approaches.

The Syllabus ends with a summary of teacher competencies of the TESTEd cross-cutting issues.

The Syllabus Sections

The following links will lead you to the different sections of the Syllabus.

1. Education on Sustainability
2. Democratic Education and Fostering Active Citizenship
3. Diversity and Equality in Gender and Sexual Identity
4. Multilingualism in Teaching and Learning
5. Digitalization of Learning Environments
6. Methodology
7. Overview of Teacher Competencies

References