Graded standards and indicators for the development of competencies in teacher education

What should student teachers be able to do when they have completed their first school internship? What competencies can be expected of a student teacher at the end of the first teacher training phase? 
Finally, how does it actually become visible how far a certain competence has already been developed? Several times, young trainee teachers are assessed in the different stages of their professional biographical process with regard to quality criteria, but which benchmark is applied?
Questions like these are an expression of a problem in teacher education that has been addressed by a working group of university teachers, seminar teachers, and those responsible for school supervision. The teacher education standards developed in Passau are based on various quality dimensions that have been shown in empirical teaching research to be decisive for teaching quality and describe the acquisition of competencies as a spiral curricular development across all phases of teacher education. In addition, the quality of teacher actions is made visible through indicators to support talk about quality actions.
With the help of the standards, (1) a contribution to the institutionalized cooperation of the phases of teacher education shall be made. In addition, the standards are intended to (2) achieve improvements with regard to the defragmentation of teacher education in subject didactics and school pedagogy studies. We hope that the standards (3) will make requirements for learners in the different phases transparent and (4) can be the basis for advisory discussions.

The group of authors has been working together since 2013 and had already developed a first version of a standards paper with sample indicators. The changes in school-based teaching and learning with and via digital media made a revised version necessary. A focus was placed on reflecting the challenges of the digital transformation in the standards. The Passau Teacher Education Standards authoring group has attempted to integrate the relevant competencies into all dimensions of teachers' work and not - as would have been conceivable - to list them separately as a separate dimension.

Since spring 2023, the group of authors has been working on a third edition of the standards, in which aspects of education for sustainable development (ESD) are to be included.

Publication

The revised standards paper was published in its entirety as PAradigma Special Edition 2020. A theoretical section introduces the educational science discussion surrounding the topic of teacher education standards and anchors the present standards and the associated indicators in current teaching quality research. The standards themselves can then be used in two ways - organized by competency dimensions or by teacher education phases.