Abstract:

Lithuania highlights the priority to promote changes in the educational systems aimed at ensuring quality of teacher education and quality education for every learner, and creating a good school for all. It requires that educators and education support professionals who will be equipped with appropriate competences and ready to work in the rapidly changing innovative school. Changes within the educational system, which are initiated by educational policy makers and academic communities, are closely related to the shift in the educational paradigm from teaching to learning and collaboration-based learning. A consortium of three Lithuanian Universities: Siauliai University, Vytautas Magnus, and Vilnius University - teacher education centres - together with their international partners from Iceland and Ireland implements the project that focuses on strategic partnership for consolidation of academic resources in order to develop innovative teacher education practices of personalized learning in different socio-cultural contexts. The aim of the project is to develop, implement, test, and transfer innovative practices of personalized learning within the teacher education system(s). In this paper, the authors aim to share the first findings from the written interviews revealing the students’ study needs and questions related to students’ participation in their study process. In the written interviews, 40 teacher students and 20 teachers took part. Interview findings reveal the focuses, including challenges, of teacher training in the three Lithuanian Universities mentioned above – teacher education centres. According to teacher students, in their studies, the verbal teaching methods prevail, e.g. lecture, discussion, explanation, text reading and analyzing, etc. However, teachers of teachers emphasize that they use teaching strategies that combine individual and group learning, e.g. collaborative and cooperative learning, problem-based learning, experiential learning, case studies etc. (see Burder, Byrd, 2019). According to teachers of teachers, the main challenges are related with administrative and study environmental factors as well as a lack of student motivation and their attitudes towards their own learning. Students stress that the main challenges relate to study administration, inappropriate e-platforms for learning, the gap between theory and practice, lack of needed literature in the native language etc. The interview findings will be used for further project activities while developing new tools and implementing new personalized learning based methods that fully involve students in their own learning.

Keywords:

Teacher training, innovations, personalised based learning.