Transforming Teacher Education

Research in teacher education will not advance unless we can come up with new theoretical explanations for the big questions in schools, such as the question about students’ non-cooperative school experiences. The goal of the study is to transform teacher education by gaining a deeper understanding of the factors impairing teaching. By integrating the disciplines of educational science and psychoanalysis, the current study explores the interplay between teachers’ defensive mechanisms and their impact on teaching. The study will demonstrate, using the DMRS-Q-Sort and referring to the didactic triangle, how the “evidence-based” defense mechanisms can negatively affect teaching. The findings show that the evidence-based defenses of affect isolation, reaction formation, and denial affect teaching in several ways, such as promoting binary thinking, tunnel vision, moralism, and pseudoscientific beliefs of teachers. These defenses may impair the teacher’s congruence, access to his teaching experience, learning from negative student feedback, self-expression and self-reflection, and counteract the core goal of mediating validated knowledge. The effects influence the students’ experiences. The research summarizes possible major changes in teacher training for both preservice and in-service teachers to transform teacher education and students’ school experiences, and it contributes to didactic research by proposing a dynamic network model with various connections.