For What Educational Goals Do Preservice Teachers Feel Responsible? On Teachers’ Ethos as Professional Values

This chapter introduces a conception of teachers’ ethos as a system of professional values, norms, and goals. Applying this perspective, we investigated preservice teachers’ endorsement of educational goals and their attribution of goals to school versus family in a four-wave panel study across the bachelor’s degree phase of initial teacher education. Specifically, we analyzed (1) how preservice teachers differentially endorsed social, intellectual, and conventional goals, and how this developed over time; (2) whether typical profiles of goal preferences were distinguishable; and (3) how educational goal endorsement could be predicted by socio-demographic, profession-related, and psychological background variables. The results revealed an overall rank order of social > conventional > intellectual goals that was stable over time. Preservice teachers attributed social goals more strongly to family; they attributed intellectual and conventional goals to school. Moreover, we identified three latent classes of goal commitment that changed in size across measurement occasions. We also found small to medium relationships between educational goal preferences regarding socio-demographic background, constructive and transmissive beliefs about teaching, pedagogical and subject-related interests, self-efficacy, and big five personality traits.