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Redalyc. Learning to Educate. New Challenges for Teacher Training, Inter-University Journal of Teacher Training. ISSN: 0213-8646. emipal@unizar.es. University of Zaragoza, Spain.

Ángel I. Pérez Gómez

SUMMARY.  This article proposes the need to reconceptualize and reformulate the theory and practice of teacher training, in light of the new demands of the information society and uncertainty, national and international research in the field, as well as international experiences in the last decade. The training of practical thinking, of basic professional qualities and competencies, requires openness to new epistemological conceptions in which the theory-practice relationship becomes complicated in a permanent movement of mutual enrichment. The work presents the theoretical assumptions and the methodological, organizational, and institutional implications that feed the new training programs for contemporary teachers through prolonged and relevant action-research processes.

KEYWORDS:Practice-based teacher training, Practical thinking, Teacher professional development.

ABSTRACT. The present article puts forward the need to reconceptualize and reformulate the theoretical and practical components in Teacher Education in the light of the new educational demands within the information and uncertainty society, the national and international research in the field, and the international experiences within the last decade. Training in practical thinking, in basic professional competences and qualities, requires the opening to new epistemological conceptions in which the relationship between theory and practice becomes complex in a continuous movement of mutual enrichment. In this paper, theoretical issues are presented together with methodological, organizational and institutional implications as they feed the new contemporary Teacher Education programs through relevant and extended Action-research processes.

KEY WORDS:Teacher Education based on practice, Teacher practical thinking, Teacher professional development.

“…University-based teacher education programs have no right to recommend teaching practices to teachers that they themselves have not satisfactorily used in their own university teaching practice.” (Russell, 1999, 220). 

“I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn” (Albert Einstein).

New demands and new challenges for schools and teachers

The substantial relevance of education in the contemporary world seems to be a common place that no one disputes. The information and uncertainty era requires citizens capable of understanding the complexity of situations and the exponential increase in information, as well as creatively adapting to the speed of change and the uncertainty that accompanies it. The widespread perception of dissatisfaction with the quality of teaching-learning processes in contemporary schools has also become a common place. The high rate of early school leaving among the most needy students, without even completing compulsory education, and the irrelevance of the content learned for passing exams, but which does not increase the useful knowledge that each citizen applies to a better understanding of complex daily, personal, social, and professional life, turn society’s gaze towards the drastic reform of a school system better adapted to the requirements of the 19th century than to the challenges of the 21st. Faced with such demands, the figure of the teacher as a catalyst for teaching-learning processes becomes the focus of attention and controversy. If schools have to respond to new and complex demands, teacher training must face similar challenges to respond to such important and novel challenges.

With certain nuances, both phenomena, the training of citizens and the training of teachers, respond to the same demands and require similar training proposals and strategies. Underlying these phenomena is the same problem: what is the relationship between the knowledge contained in scientific, artistic, or humanistic disciplines, which is embodied in conventional academic curricula and packaged in textbooks, and the training and development of individuals’ ways of thinking, feeling, and acting as citizens, individuals, and professionals? How do we understand the development of human competencies or qualities in citizens and the professional competencies or qualities in teachers?

The construction of practical thinking, of competencies (1) or human qualities, which guides and governs the interpretation and modes of intervening in reality, is presented as the true objective of educational intervention and cannot be considered a process similar to that which leads to the elaboration of theoretical knowledge, nor a simple and direct application of it. The ephemeral and situated nature of academic knowledge that students acquire in educational institutions, whether in primary or university education, is a consequence, for various reasons, of its limited relevance in contributing to the development of practical thinking and individuals’ ways of understanding, feeling, and acting in daily life.

Human beings acquire meanings from a very early age that they associate, relate, and group into interpretative, anticipatory, and planning schemes. Regardless of their scientific accuracy, gaps, and contradictions, these schemes guide their understanding, emotions, and behaviors in a specific direction. The relationship between practice and theory, between phronesis and episteme, between intuitions and reasoning, between the circumstances and situations of the context and the development of internal structures of understanding and action, is key to comprehending this process. Contemporary individuals grow up and live saturated with information and surrounded by uncertainty. Therefore, the challenge in the formation of the contemporary subject lies in the difficulty of transforming information into knowledge—that is, into organized bodies of propositions that help to better understand reality—as well as in the difficulty of transforming that knowledge into thought and wisdom (2).

Epistemological Models in the Formation of Citizens
and Teachers

In my view, the conventional school has perversely inverted the means-ends relationship: the learning of disciplinary content and the passing of exams cannot be considered or proposed as valid ends in themselves, but rather as means to facilitate the development of human qualities or competencies that we consider valuable. If they do not achieve this, these means lose all their educational legitimacy. The training of citizens and teachers in school institutions has historically been based, and continues to be so today, with very few exceptions, on a scholastic epistemological conception, which responds to a logic of linear Cartesian rationality: a mixture of naive idealism and technical mechanism (BULLOUGH and GITLIN, 2001; RUSSELL and McPHERSON, 2001), whose fundamental assumptions are the following:

• There is a linear and unidirectional relationship from theory to practice. This naive and mechanistic conception considers that practice is a mere and direct objective application of theory, and that adequate practice is guaranteed through the declarative learning of relevant theories. Furthermore, since theories do not have for the student-apprentice, in most cases, the authentic significance they may have for the researcher, scientist, or expert, theoretical, declarative learning generally becomes a mere verbal reproduction of meaningless memorized acquisitions, without use value, which the apprentice exchanges for notes, grades, or credentials, but which rarely illuminate or guide practice.
• Knowledge is presented as a sequence of finished data and closed concepts, invented by others—without the richness of syntactic strategies for inquiry and heuristic search—that must be learned as is and reproduced as faithfully as possible, without participation or subjective interpretation. Doubt, uncertainty, or awareness of relativity and contingency do not appear as constituent elements of human knowledge.
• The contents and skills to be learned are normally placed at the lower end of the knowledge scale: mechanical data and skills, routines, and simple abilities that must be learned and mastered through repetition and practice. Precisely, these are the aspects of knowledge that are currently already within the reach of electronic machines and that they can execute with much greater ease and reliability than human beings.
• Learning is conceived as a strictly individual acquisition that increases the explicit and declarative store of mental resources, a “knowing how to say-repeat,” based on the belief that even if the learner does not find its meaning or applicability at the present moment, they will find it in the future (pedagogical positions well described and criticized by Freire in his “banking pedagogy” or by Merieu in his “camel pedagogy”).
• When higher-order knowledge categories, such as schemes, models, and conceptual maps, are worked on, learning generally focuses on abstract and decontextualized activities, outside of research or creation processes and the situations in which it can be applied to solve problems, propose alternatives, or modify realities.

This epistemological orientation leads, among other things, to the following considerations about the curriculum:

• The curriculum is conceived as the result of juxtaposing different bodies of disciplinary knowledge. It is naively assumed that the learner will be able to integrate these isolated curricular fragments into meaningful theoretical and practical units.
• Secondary sources of information are mainly used, fundamentally textbooks, which form a reality of their own, isolated from the context.
• Verbal transmission, oral or written, is the preferred method. All other methodological proposals are considered a waste of time. 
• The acquisition of knowledge is verified through accreditation exams, where said knowledge is presented as a set of closed questions with unique solutions, which the student must solve, generally by reproducing it as faithfully as possible.

In short, this epistemological conception leads to a simplistic view of pedagogy as a unidirectional transmission process, of the teacher as a mere technician who imparts a prescribed curriculum, and of knowledge as a neutral, established, and finished object, with no connection to feelings, values, and biases, which is simply transferred from the teacher’s mind, or the textbook, to the learner’s mind and from the learner’s mind to their practices. (Pérez Gómez, in press).

From Dewey’s approaches, which posit teaching as a form of inquiry and knowledge creation, through neo-Piagetian and neo-Vygotskian constructivist positions, as well as from the wide dissemination of Schön’s (1983, 1987, 1992) and Argyris’s (1993) significant works on the importance of practical thinking, an epistemological alternative is consolidated that understands the formation of citizens and teachers as a permanent process of conceptual reconstruction, continuous restructuring of modes of representation, understanding, and action, in light of the experiences and reflections that each person lives with the objects, people, ideas, and contexts that surround their personal and professional existence. Thus, more in theory and academia than in school institutions and their daily practices, a constructivist epistemology emerges, based on the following principles:

• Practice should not be considered a mere direct application of theory, but a complex, uncertain, and changing scenario where interactions occur that are worth observing, relating, contrasting, questioning, and reformulating, as they are spaces and processes that generate new knowledge (Gergen, 2001). The permanent interaction of practice and theory forms a creative and dynamic loop, which expands knowledge and transforms reality, by transforming the subject who knows and acts, as a consequence of their interaction with reality.
• Stated, verbalized theories, and theories-in-use, the knowledge-in-practice, of each individual, constitute related, complementary, but independent and sometimes discrepant universes (Argyris, 1993).
• The daily, personal, social, and professional life of citizens in general, and of education professionals in particular, makes up a complex, uncertain, unpredictable scenario, laden with values and pressured by the urgency of immediate reactions. In this scenario, it is practical thinking—theories-in-use, not stated theories—that governs our interpretations and actions.
• Contemporary research leaves little doubt about the holistic and emergent nature of practical knowledge. Practical thinking seems to be the appropriate place to understand the indissoluble yet complex integration of logical and rational elements with the emotional and motivational aspects of our systems of interpretation and action. It is formed by a repertoire of conscious and unconscious images, maps, or artifacts that carry information, logical associations, desires, and emotional connotations. The meanings or representations that human beings construct and reconstruct in their interactions possess cognitive and emotional components, conscious or unconscious, indissolubly integrated into the complex unit of representation. They constitute the cognitive, affective, and behavioral substrate of each individual. The complex nature of human thought and behavior cannot be understood without the emotional and evaluative component (Dewey, 1934, 1938; Wong, 2007; Damasio, 1994, 1999; IMmordiNO-YANG and Damasio, 2007).
• Learning involves consciously and systematically reconstructing (Pérez Gómez, 1998), restructuring (Pozo, 2006), and redescribing (Karmilov-Smith, 1992) the network of representations or meanings that each individual has built throughout their personal history, through interactions in everyday settings. Learning involves increasing and rethinking the knowledge that arises from each subject’s lived and thought experience to broaden the horizon of new experiences and new knowledge, as proposed by Contreras in this same special issue (Contreras, 2010).
• Students construct knowledge by interpreting, analyzing, and evaluating, while also intervening, not simply reciting information (Daniels and Bizar, 2005).
• Knowledge that is worthwhile in education has use value, for discovering and creating new horizons or for solving problems and improving living conditions. The exchange of knowledge for grades should, in any case, be a mere secondary condition.

School or curricular training of practical knowledge, within this epistemological perspective, advises:

• Start from open questions and real problems, paying special attention to areas of uncertainty and controversy.
• Use primary sources of information. Reality itself is the privileged source of information.
• Question one’s own common conceptions, create new scientific proposals and interpretations, experiment in practice, and use new knowledge in new contexts as a methodological, didactic procedure, more valued.
• Foster cooperation, debate, synergy of shared resources, the exchange of opinions and experiences. Students must confront the discrepancy between different researchers on controversial issues, accepting the constitutive relativity of human knowledge.
• Emphasize concentration on an area of work or focus of attention, rather than covering endless encyclopedic collections of information and data with claims of exhaustiveness.
• Conceive the curriculum more as a set of relevant problems and situations, disciplinary or interdisciplinary, that challenge learners’ capacity for understanding and action, rather than as a set of juxtaposed disciplinary fragments. As Jonnaert (2008) proposes, it is not enough to teach decontextualized disciplinary content (area of a trapezoid, sum of fractions, mental calculation procedure, syntax rules, conjugation mode, etc.); it is necessary to define situations in which students can construct, modify, or refute knowledge and skills using disciplinary content. Teachers who value this way of thinking about the curriculum provide students with time to think, problems worth working on, and other peers to think with (Daniels and Bizar, 2005).

It therefore seems evident that, if the aim is to develop the basic human competencies and qualities considered valuable for citizens of the 21st century, the teacher’s task will not consist solely or primarily in teaching decontextualized disciplinary content, but in defining and posing situations in which students can construct, modify, and reformulate knowledge, attitudes, and skills, that is, promoting learners to experience the relationship between experience and knowledge themselves (Contreras, 2010). Disciplinary content is not an end in itself; it is a means, the best one, to help confront the problematic situations that surround citizens’ lives. Understanding and acting in complex situations requires certain competencies or human qualities. Competencies are developed through the actions a person takes in a given situation and the resources they rely on.

Holistic positions, such as Dewey’s (1934, 1938), insist on considering human experience as the unit of multiple different and even conflicting aspects, conscious and unconscious, rational and emotional. The challenge is to discuss opposing qualities without falling into Manichaean dualism. Too often, however, only the rationalist dimension of human knowledge and behavior has been highlighted, by placing consciousness as the sole instance of control over our thoughts and actions. However, to understand the complexity of practical knowledge, we must understand the convergence and interaction of the conscious and unconscious aspects of information processing and meaning construction that are present in all human experience. The educational task, therefore, involves provoking, facilitating, and guiding the process by which each individual reconstructs their systems of interpretation and action, systems that, let us not forget, interactively include knowledge, skills, emotions, attitudes, and values.

Learning to educate (oneself). The formation of practical thinking

The training of education professionals, their thinking and conduct, their fundamental professional competencies, involves the effective, complex, and enriching development of theory-practice interaction processes. It is obvious that to understand their thinking and actions, it is not enough to identify formal processes and information processing or decision-making strategies; it is necessary to delve into the ideological network of theories and beliefs, often implicit, that determine how the professional makes sense of their world in general and their professional practice in particular (Korthagen, 2004; KORTHAGEN et al., 2006).

Few individuals are aware of the maps, images, and artifacts that make up their practical knowledge repertoires and that they put into action, mobilize, in each situation. Such repertoires contain assumptions, better or worse organized, about one’s own identity, about others, and about the context. These assumptions constitute a microcosm of everyday knowledge that is divergent and sometimes contradictory to the theories explicitly proclaimed by the individual to explain the orientation of their conduct. Therefore, Argyris (1993) emphasizes the need to keep in mind the differences between “theories-in-use” and “proclaimed or declared theories” in the training of reflective professionals.

The personal and professional effectiveness of each individual is related to the degree of congruence they can achieve between these two “theoretical” frameworks, and there is no doubt that significant differences between them imply high levels of dysfunctionality in interpretation and action. Frequently, as Eraut (1994) highlights, explicit language, the proclaimed theory, does not describe one’s own practice but rather serves as a defense or rationalization of it. Verbal reports can distort theories and conceptualizations, favoring certain factors while underestimating the importance of others.

On the other hand, practical knowledge, as highlighted by the implicit theories current (Marrero, 1993; Pozo et al., 2006), is permeated by beliefs, better or worse organized into systems, which are formed from an early age. Implicit beliefs are fundamentally non-conscious in nature, linked to emotions, needs, desires, and affections, which remain throughout life and whose resistance to change is well known, even if their logical and rational foundations are quite scarce (Pajares, 1992, Sola Fernández, 2000).

The training of teachers’ practical thinking, their fundamental human competencies and qualities, requires attention to the development of their implicit, personal theories (Pozo, SCHEUER, MATEOS and PÉREZ ECHEVARRÍA, 2006), the hard core of their beliefs and identity (Korthagen and VASALOS, 2005). Because if explicit and declared theories do not connect with implicit theories, with the schemes, resources, habits, and intuitive ways of perceiving, interpreting, anticipating, and reacting, they become mere ornaments useful, at best, for rhetoric or for passing exams, but sterile for governing action in the complex, changing, uncertain, and urgent situations of the classroom (Lampert, 2010).

As Korthagen et al. (2006) argue, until teachers manage to reduce their declared theories to their own, informed Gestalts, there is no guarantee that these theories will guide urgent practice in complex classroom situations. Hence the multiple contradictions between thought and action. Complementarily, until teachers are able to reconstruct their intuitive beliefs, images, and Gestalts, developed through the long socialization process as students, and transform them into Gestalts informed by others’ theories and experiences (Korthagen et al., 2006), there are also no guarantees of conscious, effective action adapted to the novel demands of contemporary educational challenges. The relatively harmonious and coherent development of teachers’ practical thinking, in the implicit-explicit continuum (Martín and Cervi, 2006), requires, in my opinion, permanent processes of action research, back and forth, from intuitions to theories and from theories to intuitions and habits in the contexts and situations where intervention is necessary. Teachers must be trained as researchers of their own practice to identify and regulate the implicit and explicit resources that make up their professional human competencies and qualities.

Every experience is transformative when we build new thoughts, feelings, and actions by intensely living the context with its expected regularities, contradictions, and surprises (Garrison, 2001). To be responsible, in addition to being reflective and intentional, one must first be sensitive to what surrounds us, to what calls to us, living intensely the interaction between our desires and purposes and the possibilities and resistances of the context (Wong, 2007; Pérez Gómez, in press).

The reconstruction of practical knowledge requires teachers to review and question the very images, ideas, and practices they develop in their daily work. Hagger and Hazel (2006) call this process practical theorizing; Contreras (2010) conceives it as the relationship between experience and knowledge, as the knowledge that emerges from one’s own reflected experience. Practical theorizing is the teacher’s reflection on their own practice, on their own way of acting, in light of the most relevant educational experiences and the results of the most consistent educational research. Therefore, the privileged strategy in teacher training must consist of involving learners in disciplined and informed practical theorizing about their own practice, that is, cooperative action-research processes and programs in professional contexts (Stenhouse, 1975; Elliott, 2004). By collecting evidence on the development of their own teaching in a specific context, the teacher can problematize the implicit theories, beliefs, values, and artifacts that shape their practice and develop systematic processes for generating and testing hypotheses and action alternatives on how to implement valuable changes and innovations.

In this regard, Mezirow’s concept of transformative learning (1996, 2000) seems useful to me, due to its emphasis on critical self-reflection, as the privileged strategy for reconstructing the networks of values, beliefs, and assumptions about how things work and how each individual functions. Personal meanings are permanently constructed and reconstructed from personal experiences and validated through debate and dialogue with others (3).

Teacher training could therefore be conceived as a relevant process of metamorphosis, of “transition,” an internal process of personal reorientation and transformation, which takes advantage of and builds upon previous acquisitions and which precedes lasting and sustainable external change. In other words, it is a genuine process of education. Teachers educate themselves by becoming involved and decisively reflecting on the educational process of others, not in an abstract and theoretical way, but in the complex, conflictive, and unpredictable contexts of real classrooms and schools where they are involved and called upon (Pérez Gómez, 1998; Russell and McPherson, 2001).

In all these processes, it seems evident that research, personal inquiry, constitutes an integral part of teaching and learning, both in the general education of citizens and in the training of teaching professionals in particular. The philosophy, strategies, and instruments of research become the philosophy, strategies, and instruments of teaching. The paradoxes and contradictions, the controversies, the rigor, and the uncertainty inherent in all human inquiry must therefore also accompany the teaching and training processes of the reflective teacher, as they provide invaluable learning opportunities linked to their own practice.

The formation of practical thinking and learning contexts

It is worth remembering now (Perez Gómez and Soto, 2009) that all learning, but particularly that which is relevant and lasting, is fundamentally a byproduct of an individual’s participation in social practices, as a member of a social community. The effective acquisition of skills, attitudes, values, and knowledge, in other words, competencies, takes place as part of a process of becoming familiar with ways of being, thinking, feeling, and seeing that characterize the group and the environment in which our lives unfold (Lave and Wenger, 1991). Thus, human thought, action, and feelings grow nested in social, cultural, and linguistic contexts. The meaning of concepts and theories must be situated in real-life practices, where such concepts, ideas, and principles are functional and where they constitute resources for understanding and action for learners. The concept of situation thus becomes the central element of learning: it is in situation that the learner constructs, modifies, or refutes contextualized knowledge and develops situated competencies (Jonnaert, 2005, 2007, 2008).

If a teacher’s practical knowledge is the result of long socialization processes as a student and as a teacher in school contexts whose culture disseminates images, artifacts, and relationships that learners largely incorporate unconsciously throughout their personal and school lives (lortie, 1975), it is this school culture that must be analyzed in detail in relation to the explicit and agreed-upon goals of the community, and its effects on each learner, to understand its meaning, its congruences, and its contradictions.

On the other hand, we should not forget, as Nuthal (2005) repeatedly highlights, that teaching is a cultural ritual that has been assimilated by each generation over several centuries, and which teachers, families, and students themselves reproduce without awareness of its foundations and implications. Teaching is not a simple skill, but a complex cultural activity profoundly conditioned by beliefs and habits that function, in part, outside of consciousness and are induced by the ways the school setting operates, within the pressures of the social context. As Marilyn Cochran-Smith (2009) enthusiastically and repeatedly argues, unless a change, a transformation in school culture is provoked, only superficial changes will occur in the curriculum, roles, or bureaucratic tasks. Profound, authentic, and sustainable changes depend as much or more on beliefs and ways of understanding as on the behaviors of individuals and professionals.

Towards a new pedagogy for the formation of teachers’ practical thinking

If, as Labaree (2006, 2008) states: “No teaching that we consider valuable occurs if students have not learned what we consider valuable,” that is, if they have not developed their basic human competencies or qualities for their contemporary lives, the aims of teacher training must be expressed in terms of fundamental professional competencies or qualities as systems of professional understanding and action. These fundamental qualities or competencies of teachers as researchers of their own practice, committed to the learning and development of students, can be specified as follows (DARLING-HAMMOND, HAMMERNESS, Grossman, Rust, and Shulman, 2005; Zeichner and Conklin, 2005):

• Create and build the training curriculum based on students’ interests, strengths, and prior practical thinking. 
• Construct an open, democratic, and flexible scenario and a set of authentic activities that aim to provoke each student’s involvement, each learner’s educational experience, respecting their differences and emphasizing their strengths. 
• Tutor and guide the learning of each student, establishing the necessary personalized scaffolding. 
• Evaluate the learning process in such a way that it helps students understand their strengths and weaknesses, and to assume their own self-regulation to improve. 
• Show respect and affection for all students, understanding their different personal and emotional situations and trusting in their ability to learn. Strive for close and respectful interaction and communication, provoking the feeling in students that they are respected and heard. 
• Develop in ourselves the best human qualities that we want to provoke in students: enthusiasm for knowledge, inquiry and intellectual curiosity, justice, honesty, respect, collaboration, commitment, solidarity, and compassion. 
• Become active members of the learning community, taking responsibility for the collective project and for our own ongoing professional development. 
• Assume responsibility for our own lifelong learning and professional development process, questioning the value of our own knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and attitudes, our ways of thinking, feeling, and acting as individuals and as teachers.

These qualities or competencies can be grouped into three basic professional competencies that underpin most innovative teacher training programs:

• Competence to plan, develop, and evaluate teaching that aims to foster the development of desirable human qualities in students.
• Competence to create and maintain open, flexible, democratic, and culturally rich environments where a positive learning climate is stimulated.
• Competence to promote one’s own professional development and the formation of learning communities with colleagues and other stakeholders in education.

We cannot forget that when using the term qualities, competencies, or practical thinking, we are referring to systems of understanding and action, and that, therefore, they include knowing how to think, knowing how to say, knowing how to do, and wanting to do. The teacher’s commitment and active involvement are key to professional development and clearly include rational and emotional aspects, explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge, concrete techniques and skills, and theoretical strategies and models. Thus, programs that aim to develop practical knowledge and teachers’ professional competencies must establish a rich, permanent interaction between practice and theory (practicum, fieldwork, clinical experience, induction programs, etc.) and use cooperative action-research projects as the privileged pedagogical strategy (4).

As we all know from experience and as research confirms, in the formal education system, from early childhood to university, assessment constitutes the true and definitive curriculum, as it indicates “what counts.” Therefore, in a teacher training program that aims to develop the basic professional competencies discussed earlier, the processes of assessment, grading, and accreditation must be configured congruently with the pedagogical philosophy we have considered valuable. Assessing basic professional competencies requires a multiplicity and diversity of procedures, strategies, techniques, and instruments that can approximate the complexity of the phenomena we wish to provoke: the creative and critical relationship between practice and theory, experience and knowledge, as well as linking cognitive, affective, and behavioral aspects (5). These programs will use a wide variety of flexible and open diagnostic resources and instruments: observation of performance, portfolios, journals, reports, debates, interviews, teamwork… to respond to the requirements of authentic and formative assessment of fundamental professional competencies and qualities (WIGGINS, 1996, 1998; TILLEMA, 2009; MONEREO, 2003; James, 2007) 6.

Ultimately, learning to educate means learning to educate oneself continuously throughout the teacher’s professional life. Preparing teachers for these demands requires a radical transformation of traditional training methods. We need professionals who are experts in their respective fields of knowledge and, at the same time, are committed and competent to provoke relevant learning in students, because teaching that fails to provoke learning loses its legitimacy. However, there is little doubt that faculties of Education Sciences and teacher training institutions are far from the ideal of training competent teaching professionals for the task that education demands, as we have considered it here. The training of 21st-century teachers requires a radical change, not a mere cosmetic or bureaucratic change of names or accounting on paper, but a substantial change in perspective, culture, and current practices (Stigler and Hiebert, 1999; Mumby, Russel, and Martin, 2001). It requires a curriculum based on practice, focused on problematic situations, developed through integrated projects that actively involve future teachers in authentic tasks within real scenarios and contexts, where they learn to educate by cooperatively experiencing authentic educational innovation processes, intervening in the complex contexts of the classroom, observing the difficulties and resistances imposed by the school system, restricted and insufficient spaces, inflexible times, scarce resources, the expectations of the stakeholders involved… reflecting on their own practice, analyzing and debating possible improvement alternatives, accessing external theoretical and practical examples and models, and constantly reformulating their own projects, designs, methods, scenarios, tasks, and forms of evaluation.

As we have already indicated, the prevailing practice in current teacher training is based on a model that, although obsolete, is resistant: the supposed deferred and direct application of theory to practice. Academic courses, teaching practices, tutoring and supervision, educational innovation in schools, and pedagogical research are being configured, even in new study plans, as independent areas with no integration or communication between them, and with little conceptual and institutional congruence in their programs. There isn’t even a common vision among the agents involved in teacher training regarding what good teaching means, what a good teacher should be, and how to train them (LEVINE, 2006; HIEBERT, GALLIMORE & STIGLER, 2002; MUNBY, RUSSELL & MARTIN, 2001; BAIN, 2006; FERNÁNDEZ RODRÍGUEZ, RODRÍGUEZ NAVARRO & RODRÍGUEZ ROJO, in this special issue)7. Consequently, the fragmentation and decontextualization of the teacher training curriculum, the separation of theory and practice, research and action, the divorce between school and university; between knowledge, skills, attitudes, and affections, ruin the educational possibilities of any program for training competent professionals.

At the present time, with the implementation of the new study plans, promoted by the so-called Bologna Process, it is easy to understand the magnitude of the opportunity we are losing to face the substantive change required for the training of 21st-century teachers and the need to begin, with some independence from official routines and provisions, to experiment with new forms and models for training these professionals, taking advantage of the significant loopholes, wide cracks, and numerous degrees of freedom that present themselves in our daily work. Good luck to all. Thank you.

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Notes

1. I use the term “competencies” here in the holistic sense defended in the DESECO document (OECD, 2003; PÉREZ GÓMEZ, 2008; PERRENOUD, 2004; JONNAERT et al., 2005). For example, for Perrenoud (2004), the competency-based approach is a way of taking seriously, in other words, an old problem, that of “knowledge transfer”. Competency, for Jonnaert et al. (2005, 674), is the implementation of a diversified and coordinated set of resources, which the person mobilizes in a given context. This implementation is based on the choice, mobilization, and organization of resources. Resources are conative (e.g., the person’s commitment in the situation), bodily (hand movement when writing), material (a dictionary or program), social (exchange with a colleague), cognitive (recall of a memorized procedure or a heuristic strategy),… A competency corresponds to a complex know-how that relies on the mobilization and effective use of a variety of resources… A competency is more heuristic than algorithmic.
2. I understand wisdom as the art of knowing how to navigate and manage in situations of uncertainty, aware of the possibilities and limitations of the context and ourselves, by virtue of our own values and purposes, debated and questioned. The ability and willingness to use the best available knowledge to develop and pursue one’s own life, personal, social, and professional project.
3. Similarly, Fenwick (2003) proposes three ideas for understanding adult learning: a) learning is experiential, as it emerges jointly with the context, individuals, and activity; b) understanding is embodied in behavior, emotions, and relationships among participants; and c) the continuous process of invention and exploration is linked to imbalance, dissonance, and is amplified by others’ feedback and responses.
4. The experimental teacher training program project for early childhood education at the University of Malaga proposes the following guiding principles: – Prioritize a close relationship between theory and practice or practice and theory, which implies emphasizing the quantitative and qualitative importance of practical contexts and components of the curriculum. Competencies are complex systems of reflection and action, many of whose components must necessarily be formed in action, in practice. Reflection in and on action is the privileged strategy of the entire training process. The link between research and concrete practice becomes the priority pedagogical tool. It will therefore be essential to establish close relationships between the University and schools so that both actively participate in all phases of the training process for future teachers, from the planning of teaching to the evaluation and accreditation of the degree. – Enhance the modular structure of the curriculum. Without prejudice to distinguishing corresponding subjects where appropriate, we consider that the modular structure for curriculum organization overcomes one of the most significant deficiencies of our current study plans, which is fragmentation, and allows for broader curricular spaces that facilitate the acquisition and development of basic competencies, by enabling teaching strategies that integrate theory and practice, as well as fostering the initiative and activity of the learner individually and in work groups, on authentic tasks and in real contexts, situations, and problems. The modular structure implies cooperation between teachers, first within the same department and then between departments involved in the same module. 
   • Stimulate the development of the tutorial, personalized nature of university teaching, clearly situating teaching methodologies at the service of the learning of each and every student, which requires attending to diversity and respecting the uniqueness of the learning processes that the teacher must stimulate, accompany, guide, and correct. This implies a sensible student-teacher ratio that cannot exceed 50 students per basic teaching group.
   • Facilitate the convergence between teaching and research, so that the latest advances in knowledge in each field are placed at the service of student learning. This means ensuring that teaching is assigned to the areas, departments, and teachers who are most relevant due to their research and academic background.
   • Establish curricular flexibility as the key to the permanent development of study plans, so that they can react to the permanent change and development of knowledge and society. This implies methodological plurality and openness to the permanent incorporation of new content and new teaching and evaluation methods.
   • To promote, stimulate, and enhance the development of the future teacher’s autonomy, encouraging the optativity of courses, seminars, and workshops, as well as the practical, idiosyncratic, and unique forms of intervention of each student, so that their own professional personality is strengthened. 
   • To ensure coherence throughout the process, between the definition of the profile and competencies, the selection and sequencing of content, the formulation of teaching and evaluation strategies, and the organization of learning contexts, paying attention to the space, time, and grouping of students.
5. In this regard, the proposal made by the New Zealand Teacher Council (Kane, 2008) on the principles that should govern evaluation processes in the different initial teacher training programs can be consulted, which are summarized as follows. Evaluation should: 
   • To be an integral part of the learning process. 
   • Enrich and promote student learning through formative assessment. 
   • Motivate students to develop their skills, knowledge, and attitudes. 
   • Stimulate the development of the capacity for reflection, self-assessment, and shared assessment with peers. 
   • Stimulate the development of cooperative learning as well as individual learning.
   • Seek coherence between assessment and the proposed learning objectives. 
   • Seek reliability by grounding in relatively stable evidence and verifiable information.
   • Be manageable in terms of the workload required. 
   • Involve the negotiation and transparency of assessment criteria.
6. The program used by a consortium of major universities in California, called the Professional Attributes Questionnaires (PAQ), designed to assess teaching dispositions and professional competencies in four fundamental domains, can be consulted in this regard: 1) Design of teaching and assessment to promote student learning (31% of the test). 2) Create a positive and productive classroom environment (15% of the test). 3) Develop effective and sensitive teaching and assessment procedures (31% of the test). 4) Fulfillment of professional functions and responsibilities in accordance with the ethical and legal requirements of the profession (23% of the test).
7. As stated in the presentation of this special issue, this dissatisfaction with conventional, institutional, and curricular models of teacher training has led to extensive and intense theoretical and practical production of models and reforms on the international scene. Examples include the following: Carnegie Forum (1986); Holmes Group (1986); National Commission on Excellence in Teacher Education (1985); Project 30 Alliance (1991); Renaissance Group (1996); Tom (1997); Zeichner (2007); Grossman (2005); Grossman et al. (2009); Darling-Hammond, Bransford, LePage, Hammerness, and Duffy (2005); National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future (1996); The AERA Special Interest Group “Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices” (S-STEP); Teacher For America (TFA); Teacher for a New Era (TNE); “School based teacher education”, IVLOS (Utrecht University); the substantial reform carried out in Finland in the last decade; Boston Teacher Residency (BTR) and the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL) in Chicago (Solomon, 2009).