ADOPTING IDEAS FROM CURRENT NORDIC TEACHER EDUCATION STRATEGIES TO INITIAL SCIENCE TEACHER EDUCATION

A key goal of initial teacher education in all countries is to educate quality teachers through a quality post-secondary programme and then support them in their careers through professional learning. However, there are different definitions and interpretations of a quality teacher or a quality teacher education programme. Several terms are used to describe a quality teacher, such as professional, effective, competent, expert, or ideal (Stronge & Hindman, 2003; Goel, Bell, & Little, 2008). Furthermore, the definition of a quality teacher changes continuously and follows the current trends of society and working life. Consequently, national-level teacher education strategies and teacher education programmes are continuously improved. In the Nordic region, all countries have been developing initial teacher education at the national and institutional levels over the last five years. In this editorial, I will briefly analyse the aims of new Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish national-level teacher education strategies. Then I will briefly discuss how we can improve science teacher education according to the new strategies.