In summer 2023, the team responsible for the “Building Blocks for Planning Language-sensitive Teacher Education” project completed a further cornerstone of their project. The Teacher Competence Profiles are at the heart of a Building Block that offers teacher educators, as well as (future) teachers, opportunities to reflect on the professional competences underpinning language-sensitive education.
The Profiles competence areas such as methodology, digital competences, and language competences, but also collaboration, career-long learning, language awareness and, last but not least, a set of core principles and values. The Profiles themselves can be used as a set of instruments in their own right.
However, the main aim of the Building Block is to illustrate the various competences to be focused on in planning teacher education curricula, courses, and teaching practice, as addressed in the other Building Blocks.
The competence dimensions are inspired by a number of ECML projects concerned with teacher competences, including the Guide to teacher competences for language in education, Promoting excellence in sign language education, and Developing teacher competences for pluralistic approaches.
The most innovative aspect of the Building Block Profiles is the way in which they illustrate, through common and subject-specific illustrative examples, where the specific language-related competences needed by teachers of different languages and other subjects overlap, and where they may differ.
The project team: Lukas Bleichenbacher (project coordinator), Nataša Pirih Svetina, Richard Rossner, Anna Schröder-Sura