Teachers' Characteristics for a Sustainable Future: From the Perspective of Pre-Service Teachers

Introduction

The teacher is the main component of the educational system and social development. The teaching profession is a professional job open to continuous development. Teachers’ tasks and responsibilities have increased today and society’s perspectives of the teaching profession have changed. Teachers can raise awareness and prepare their students for a sustainable future by providing them with resources relevant to their interests, encouraging critical thinking skills and enabling them to collaborate to meet the challenges of a sustainable future (Su et al., 2012). Teacher training policies were revised in many countries as a result of technological and social changes especially to raise the quality of teachers and thus societies embarked on a new quest. The reason for it is that effective teachers should be raised for effective teaching. For this reason, training teachers having various efficacies have become a target for all countries (Çelebi, 2015).

Countries across the world need effective, well-educated and competent teachers (Rushton, Morgan, & Richard, 2007). Even though the effective teacher is a concept, which everyone is aware of and which is known to everybody, it is difficult to make a description of an effective teacher and the characteristics of an effective teacher (Korthagaen, 2004; Pozo-Munoz, Rebolloso-Pacheco, & Fernandez-Ramirez, 2000). Besides, there is no agreed definition of a good teacher in the literature (Kızıltepe, 2002). Shulman (1987), for instance, listed the knowledge that a teacher should have under 7 categories as “(1) content knowledge, (2) general pedagogical knowledge, (3) curriculum knowledge (4) pedagogical content knowledge, (5) knowledge of learners and their characteristics; (6) knowledge of educational contexts (7) knowledge of educational ends, purposes, and values, and their philosophical and historical grounds”. Moreover, the description of an effective teacher also changes over time. The perspective concerning effective teachers changed from the description of “ideal teachers” in the 1950s to “satisfying teachers” and to “diversity responsive teachers” in the 1990s (Cruickshank & Haele, 2001). At first, an effective teacher was described as “a good person”. An effective teacher was described as a teacher who considers the needs of the society and who raises ideal citizens according to the needs and who set a good role model to their students. Thus, teachers were evaluated rather based on the behaviours they had displayed, but their behaviours in the learning/teaching process were considered as of secondary importance. However, it was pointed out later that describing an effective teacher according to the ideals of society was wrong and that what was important was the behaviours a teacher displayed in the classroom (Borich, 2014).