In the present study, we aimed to specify the key competence domains perceived to be critical for the teaching profession and depict them as a comprehensive teacher competence model. An expert panel that included representatives from seven units providing university-based initial teacher education in Finland carried out this process. To produce an active construction of a shared understanding and an interpretation of the discourse in the field, the experts reviewed literature on teaching. The resulting teacher competence model, the multidimensional adapted process model of teaching (MAP), represents a collective conception of the relevant empirical literature and prevailing discourses on teaching. The MAP is based on Blömeke et al.’s, Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 223, 3–13, (2015) model which distinguishes among teacher competences (referring to effective performance of teachers’ work), competencies (knowledge, skills, and other individual competencies underlying and enabling effective teaching), and situation-specific skills of perceiving, interpreting, and making decisions in situations involving teaching and learning. The implications of the MAP for teacher education and student selection for initial teacher education are discussed.

This article investigates the perceived and actual predictability of teacher educators working as assessors in entrance examinations for the Finnish Primary School Teacher Education (PSTE) programme. The section examining perceived predictability was conducted as a survey. The data for actual predictability, containing student teachers' entrance examination scores and student achievements, was collected from the student register. The findings indicate that although teacher educators consider themselves able to predict applicants' performance in the PSTE programme, their actual predictability in entrance examinations was poor. The assessments predicted only slightly student teachers' study pace in the PSTE programme, while better scores in entrance examinations predicted, in fact, weaker grades in studies. Teacher educators also conform to hidden quotas based on Finnish student selection paradigms in awarding better entrance examination scores to male and older applicants. The findings highlight teacher educators' need for more structured professional learning in a gatekeeping context.

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Teachers' agency is an essential factor in understanding and developing pedagogics. The study adds to the previous research by employing a new materialist perspective, highlighting the notion that teachers' agency is not merely a matter of humans, but results from assemblages of both human and nonhuman elements in teaching. The context of the study is the school lockdown period of the Covid-19 pandemic. Twenty Finnish primary teachers were interviewed to explore how teachers verbalised the rapid transition to a distance teaching environment and to discern what kind of agency that transition unfolds. The findings illustrate lost agency, but simultaneously, new forms of agency emerging from the entanglement of humans and materiality in the changed assemblages. This understanding helps to support both preservice and in-service teachers' agency in ways that acknowledge the complexity of teacher learning beyond individualistic and controllable views in increasingly multifaceted teaching environments.