New ZLSB podcast: Global insights into the teacher shortage

Intro:

Person 1: For me, reading at university means that I get a lot of information relatively quickly and also relatively easily and deal with topics.

Person 2: Acquiring meaningfully structured knowledge and thus learning more about the world.

Person 3: Reading is our main access to new and old information, but also the best way to develop ourselves.

Ines Röhrborn: Hello and welcome to our ZLSB book podcast entitled Reading Center for the 20th anniversary of the ZLSB this year. The Reading Center offers employees and ZLSB members the opportunity to present a book that is particularly close to their hearts. The aim is to get people talking about books that move and inspire them.

Today we are certainly doing this justice, as we are discussing a book that was published in 2025 in time for the 20th anniversary of the ZLSB, brings together international authors published by the ZLSB and features insights, problem-solving strategies and new ways of tackling the global phenomenon of teacher shortages. I am Ines Röhrborn, a teacher on secondment in higher education, and I have the pleasure of moderating for you today. I am particularly pleased to welcome my two guests today. I would like to warmly welcome Professor Axel Germann, Managing Director of the ZLSB, and Dr. Peggy Germer, Project Coordinator of the in-service qualification of teachers in Saxony. Both are here today as co-editors of a special anthology: Teacher Shortage in International Perspectives, Insights and Responses. Nice to have you both here today.

Axel Gehrmann: Yes, good afternoon.

Peggy Germer: Good afternoon.

Ines Röhrborn: Hello.

The first question on my mind is, of course, how did this idea of this first international anthology of the ZLSB in this open access format come about?

Axel Gehrmann: Yes, of course, there is a shortage of teachers everywhere. In the Free State of Saxony, we have been dealing with this at the ZLSB for over 10 years now. This in-service qualification has also gradually developed here as a central model to counter the shortage of teachers in the state. The model is unique in Germany and is widely regarded. And with this in mind, we also asked ourselves what the shortage actually looks like internationally. What is being done about it? What is being done about it? And we used our stakeholders, so to speak, who we had already become acquainted with in an international context. That was actually the idea.

Peggy Germer: Exactly, and as a result we held a conference in 2020, the so-called LETE conference, Lateral Entry Teacher Education, i.e. a lateral entry conference on the topic of teacher shortages and the consequences for teacher training. At the time, 120 guests from 16 countries were invited. These included the USA, the Czech Republic and Sweden, from which the stakeholders for the book were drawn. And we must not forget that in the midst of this huge corona wave, which began in March, everything was in virtual format, and so the conference was also in virtual format. And that was the first time that we had any major contact with each other again.

The whole thing was preceded by the founding of IMPRESS in 2019. This is a department of the ZLSB that deals with internationality through mobility projects, research and corresponding synergies, where the first network partners were recruited, so to speak.

Ines Röhrborn: Okay, so the idea really matured slowly and some time ago. [Axel Gehrmann: Yes, the authors in the anthology come from 11 countries, including Australia, the USA, Japan, Sweden, Ireland and others. How did the authors come to be selected and what distinguishes them?

Axel Gehrmann: Well, Peggy Germer has already pointed this out. So we have a network that is gradually developing in 2018/2019, but we have actually been traveling internationally at the ZLSB since 2014/2015. And it's not always just about formal encounters and getting to know each other's different education systems, but also about generating project ideas. And against this background, there has always been an interest in bringing things together. And what unites the countries at the moment? It's the shortage of teachers. That's more or less how it came about.

On the one hand, we could have integrated many more stakeholders because the network is much larger than the countries, but organizing a product like this is not that easy. And there are also countries where the stakeholders themselves say that we don't want to report on this ourselves and so on. The conditions in the countries and the freedom of movement of reporting are very different, and in some countries it is not as open as in Germany that we can actually say, based on data, what the potential shortage looks like. In this respect, there are high-quality stakeholders from the individual countries. We have always tried to find people who actually have a formative influence on the topic in the country. We will come back to this in a moment and will therefore also be able to say something, so that we also have people who were not present at the conference itself but who have nevertheless been included in the volume. So far.

Peggy Germer: Exactly, and for me it was important that not only partners who are now renowned worldwide are included, but also the perspective of neighboring countries, so that we were able to recruit partners in the Czech Republic and Poland. In the Czech Republic, for example, directly from the city of Ústí nad Labem from Purkyně University, Dr. Petra Fuková, who has done a lot of work on combined studies, which we will come back to later. Or Professor Joanna Madalińska-Michalak from the University of Warsaw, who focuses primarily on the role of female teachers, but also on the shortage of teachers and the professionalism of alternative paths. Or let's mention Falk Radisch from the federal state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, who looks at the big picture, the complex, so to speak, the conditional factors, how does the shortage of teachers come about in the first place and how can we influence it?

Ines Röhrborn: The anthology itself is divided into three main parts. Firstly, country portraits are presented, then alternative approaches and finally empirical research and measures to counter the shortage of teachers. Professor Germann, your chapter in Part 1 of the anthology is entitled 'Side entry and career jump into the teaching profession'. What exactly is it about?

Axel Gehrmann: As with all the articles in the volume, it is an attempt to systematically describe what actually constitutes the shortage of teachers in the Federal Republic of Germany or in the country being reported on. In this respect, it reports on the history of the shortage in the historical context after 1945 and then in particular the turn to the last 10 years, when this began to take hold more strongly in East Germany, and I also said very early on with colleagues here that this would also become an issue in the West German situation. And that was not a matter of course 10 years ago, when some people were still laughing at us as if the topic didn't really have any scientific merit. In this respect, it was an attempt to trace something historically and at the same time to show this alternative way of dealing with the shortage of teachers in Saxony.

Ines Röhrborn: You yourself were a visiting professor in Japan for quite some time, where you also got to know Professor Kenji Maehara. His article has a very exciting title, namely 'Between teacher shortage and the wind of change'. How did you perceive this article after spending some time in Japan yourself?

Axel Gehrmann: Kenji Maehara's article is a very long product of mutual exchange. It's not a given that we not only don't speak the same language, but we also have to focus on topics in terms of how to work on something scientifically. And that's not so easy. In this respect, we worked on the article for a long time, especially as he initially said, well, can I work on this at all, because actually, the way you mean it with the shortage of teachers or lateral entry, we don't even know that problem in Japan. In that respect, he's right, that's how I perceived it. What we are assuming here, that there will be a shortage of around 80,000 to 100,000 teachers in the next few years, he does not confirm this for his own country and then also explains why this is the case. Nevertheless, he also sees something on the horizon for Japan, because in the past, in the heyday of professional acceptance of the profession, there were sometimes up to 15 people who could apply for one job. In the meantime, in Tokyo, mind you, the capital of Japan, where we never really have problems finding people in Germany, the ratio has fallen to one to one. And this is against the background that the article - and he has also said this in several articles at conferences - is basically more about us in Japan having to assume that he is talking about lightweight teacher training. And lightweight here means that our undergraduate teacher training structure does not actually exist in Japan. And that it is more of an additional course in a general course with a few credits, and I'll take the example of when our students in Germany always talk about 'we need more practice', then in Japan it is the case that in an eight-semester course, two to three weeks of school visits are planned, if at all. And that's what he traces - the lightweight nature and at the same time the problem that when we talk about lateral entry, we have to set up our own programs, such as our BQL project. That's the way it is in Japan: Every student can basically take an option for a teaching profession during their studies, regardless of which one, so that there is a disproportionate number of teaching certificates, and these certificates are then used to recruit lateral entry, so to speak, i.e. people from other professions for the teaching profession. In this respect, the problems of demand are there, but they can be recruited differently.

Ines Röhrborn: So Japan has already made preparations, so to speak?

Axel Gehrmann: Yes, well, we can have a wide-ranging discussion about whether it was built in advance or is it simply a completely different teacher training system? For the teacher training stakeholders, it is often just a solitary issue. It's about their own cause and ensuring that we have enough graduates. But basically, teacher training is a central pillar of every international higher education system. And this higher education system in Japan is structured completely differently to that in Germany. And I'll take the example that we live from a state perspective. We have 16 federal states and around 70 teacher training institutions with 80 million or 85 million inhabitants. Japan has 130 million inhabitants and over 1000 opportunities to study to become a teacher. This means that there are many more contexts in which you can potentially obtain the certificate. And that's where the comparability comes in. You can also tell from a volume like this how difficult it is to draw the same lines, because there are very different cultures behind it. So here a federal structure, Japan a very centralized structure, but a situation that operates in over 40 prefectures and organizes the supply of teachers locally. So that's strategic, maybe it's smarter, but they're not obviously better trained.

Ines Röhrborn: Okay, thank you. Which country portrait would you recommend reading?

Peggy Germer: Yes, Professor Germann has just reported on the Japanese perspective, a little further away, and I would like to talk about a European perspective that is a little closer to home, namely the Czech perspective again. You wouldn't believe how similar certain programs are, and the combined study program described by Petra Fuková from the University of Ústí nad Labem is quite comparable. That's why I chose this perspective in particular, but all the others are of course just as worth reading. The people who take up these studies are also at school. They are around 40 years old. They have children and they appreciate the connection between their studies and their career. But also, from the perspective that it is very demanding - that's what they said - they see this course as very difficult. And I think it's important to know a few details in the background. After the political change, Russian was dropped as a subject, and the schools then moved on to other subjects, including English and German as a foreign language. There were virtually no trained teachers for German as a foreign language. As a result, unqualified teachers - unqualified in the sense of German - were initially hired, and later the Czech government imposed a program that required everyone to be qualified. And the university in Usti took this on board and set up a program that differs slightly from our perspective. We also have such a program, BQL, the in-service qualification of teachers, where the people come to us for two days, are released for the two days and get six hours off. And in the Czech Republic, people are also trained for two days, but on Friday and Saturday. And on Friday it starts at 2 p.m. and ends at 9 p.m., and on Saturday it runs from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. without any reduction hours, all on top, with a high proportion of self-study. And people have six to eight semesters, depending on whether they graduate with a Bachelor's or Master's degree. We don't differentiate between Bachelor's and Master's degrees. In our case, you get a teaching qualification for schools afterwards, but we usually have four semesters. So you can see that the situation is similar, the reactions to it are different, but it's still comparable. And I think it's worth it that it's so close, because you can simply take on board the perspectives and exchange ideas. Oh, I don't want to spoil too much, the book is still to be read.

Ines Röhrborn: Exactly.

Axel Gehrmann: But perhaps I'll add something about Poland. I was very fascinated by it. The article is very detailed with regard to the voivodeships, actually even how concrete the shortage is and how difficult it is to set up alternative programs at all. There is a tremendous depth to it, where my colleague makes a very determined attempt to show just how complex the phenomenon actually is and how strong this urban-rural divide is, which we are also experiencing. This is of course much more pronounced there than here, because the levels of modernization are very different. So it's very detailed, and that was really fascinating. And the second thing - let's take a counterpoint - in relation to the western hemisphere, what Richard Ingersoll describes about the USA is also very fascinating, because he introduced something very early on, 20 years ago, that is now also becoming more of a topic in Germany: the teacher pipeline. The Americans have always talked about pipelines. So how is it with the permeability, how many people are hired and so on. And you can understand that very well with him, across the whole country. And the second thing is to develop an understanding of the fact that he is also trying to be more resolute in not talking about the programs, which are not diverse in the USA. The teaching profession - he always wants to maintain the basic pipeline and attract more people. The difficulty he sees in the USA is that we don't even think about it yet: He says there are always new needs for new teachers because there are too many, in his sense, bad schools where lateral entrants have to keep going because there aren't enough undergraduates to stay there. And so the pipeline has to be filled again and again. We haven't even got that far in our research yet to think about who is actually being fed into the pipeline and what is actually particularly thematic. I find that very interesting.

Ines Röhrborn: Research is also a good keyword for the transition, because the third part of the volume also presents empirical research and explores successful examples from teaching. At the end, Professor Germann, you developed three models that make it possible to overcome or counteract the shortage of teaching staff. What are they and how do they work?

Axel Gehrmann: Well, I wouldn't say to counter rather than remedy. The models are very different, but it is actually an attempt to say that there is more of a statist approach to remedying the shortage. In other words, the state community takes care of it rather than private people or institutions actually trying to address the shortage. That is the German model or the Swedish model. Then we have this Anglo-American model, in the context, let's say, of New Public Management, which is very market-oriented and then says, well, we might build institutions that are necessary and then provide care for the whole country, perhaps digitally. And where the state then says: 'Let it be'. We'll see, somehow it will work out and each county will then be responsible for how many teachers it organizes for itself, which is very alien to us, from a statist perspective. And the Japanese model is completely different. It is simply an attempt at overproduction, or rather it is a different model of university altogether. With regard to the teaching profession, we think, let's be careful, that it prepares you for a career, qualifies you for a career, leads directly into the pipeline of the profession. In Japan, there are actually no degree programs that lead directly into a career, or that are not actually associated with a career at all, because it is always 'learning on the job' later in an institution, in an administration, public administration or in a company. Ultimately, in Japan, it doesn't matter what you study, if you can pass the entrance exam for different companies. Or the university you studied at is important, but what you studied is completely irrelevant. So overproduction in the sense of: Everyone goes for, or many people go for, the teaching option, even though they don't want to, because they later say, maybe I want to change careers. So there are three different models: more of a statist model - the state takes care of things; more of a laissez-faire model; and the other variant is accepting overproduction and then 'learning on the job' in a targeted manner.

Ines Röhrborn: The international volume was published this year in February and within four months there have already been over 21,000 clicks on this open access book. Who is the target group and how do you envisage this success?

Peggy Germer: Yes. Of course, we can't check it 100%, but we assume that the target group is firstly educational stakeholders who are out and about at universities and colleges. Secondly, of course, ministries that are involved, educational stakeholders from other offices, roughly speaking, interested people from politics and education and perhaps one or two network partners who have encouraged their students, but also their lecturers in the field of alternative teacher training, to be part of the readership. But it would of course be an exciting research question to find out. Because 21,000 is of course a considerable number. We have various research networks that can be accessed online. And I think that the Springer publishing house has certainly achieved a wide range in terms of enabling free access worldwide and making the contents of the book available.

Ines Röhrborn: So it's certainly a great result.

Peggy Germer: Yes. Thank you.

Axel Gehrmann: Among other things, it also means that we have now been invited to conferences by people we don't even know. People who are not even there in that context. And that has already happened several times, that there have been queries. And my impression is that this research topic, the shortage of teachers or alternative routes into the profession, which is linked to it, is moving everywhere from a rather marginal position to the center, so that interests are suddenly emerging and people are coming out of marginalization. People are now quite happy and think to themselves: it's similar there. We're seeing this more often now, with educational stakeholders asking questions. That's a good result. And that was the aim.

Ines Röhrborn: I still imagine it was a huge, mammoth project to bring together 11 nations and the authors. It also took some time before it was published. What are your next publication ideas for the near future?

Axel Gehrmann: Well, if you think about it briefly, yes, it took a long time. The conference was in 2020. We had corona, and getting people to work in general. I've been an editor before. It's not easy in Germany either, but if you still have to do it internationally, then you have this crisis situation, then also a publishing house that operates internationally, but also communicates internationally in a certain style that you have to get used to, then it also takes a bit of time. We have learned from that, and at the same time we benefit from the networks, so to speak. Yes, the next thing we will definitely do: We have now collected empirical data on the extra-occupational qualification, BQL, which we have been doing since 2016/2017, and we now want to finalize it. In other words, we want to summarize the data from the last few years. We not only have a description of the structure of the teacher shortage in the Free State, but we can also say what the situation is like in Germany as a whole, and we then have our own material on the different types of school and the different subjects. In the meantime, I am very proud of the fact that we have encouraged the creation of new doctorates on the subject. In other words, the topic is now basically taking on a life of its own, which is great, and we are trying to capture this Saxon perspective once again and say, okay, this is now our product, this is our empirical research, and then we also want to move on to further empirical research, so to speak, because the lateral entry continues. But certain topics simply have to be approached differently now, because we now know how old the lateral entrants are, what their habitual orientations are, what previous educational experience they have. It's basically crazy, even internationally everything is so incredibly similar. You can, we've been to Australia, present the data, and our colleague Marylin from Melbourne says: 'Wow, Axel, yes, it's like that here too'. So, there's a global social context to this, and that's fascinating, and we'll summarize it briefly.

Peggy Germer: Exactly. In addition to the empirical data, it is of course also important that we present our examples of good practice and best practice. The Dresden model is a successful model that is visible throughout Germany, and I think it's worth taking a look at the subjects to see which methods and didactic models are used to implement teaching really successfully. And to get these, usually two years per subject, qualifications well and in the best possible way.

Ines Röhrborn: I wish you every success for the next round of publications. And I would also be interested to know whether there is anything that you personally have taken away from this anthology or from the individual articles that has influenced your perspective in a new or perhaps lasting way.

Peggy Germer: Yes, then I'll just start. I think what Professor Germann has already said, the similarity of the problem, sometimes the same approaches to solutions, even though we are 20,000 km apart, but also the different approaches to certain issues, the integration into structures in the country and educational actors that are located differently. And if I may come back to Australia, what fascinated me was that it is not the money factor that is the decisive factor in changing careers in mid-career, but the intrinsic motivation to give something back to society, to do something for school education and thus to shape the future. And I would like to go back to what Mr. Germann said about the publication, because it's always about what moved me about the anthology. Working together with international partners over a period of five years, also the patience, the ability to endure sometimes unclear situations. The Russian war against Ukraine has broken out in the meantime. The invasion of Israel. Of course, all of this resonates in this conference volume, in the times and deadlines, and I am extremely grateful that we were able to publish the first English-language volume of the ZLSB with so many stakeholders who stayed with us until the end.

Axel Gehrmann: For me, the situation of people has become even more sustainable: Who actually chooses the profession? And I'm glad to see that there is something like a special interest in the job all over the world. I still don't think we have to forcibly recruit people or anything like that as a matter of course. That is one thing. So we can also find people in an older context in a labor market that we can respond to, so to speak. And the second thing is that in other countries people are much more relaxed about changes in the employment system or even always anticipate these changes. In other words, we are very focused in Germany on our undergraduate teaching structure, and it absolutely has to be that way, and it can only work that way and nowhere else, never any other way. And this is taken much more calmly in other countries and yet, if you then look at the outputs of the education system, i.e. the school system, in an international comparison, they do not produce gigantically worse or gigantically better results. And that should give us pause for thought. We invest an enormous amount of money in undergraduate teacher training and don't make use of what Maehara, for example, says about lateral entrants: they can bring a breath of fresh air into the institution. So why don't we use this in a much more targeted manner? Why isn't it possible to change careers? Why isn't it a matter of course to start a business first and then be a teacher and not take that as a social stigma and so on? These are things that are actually very strongly anchored in my mind. So we are very rigid, and on the other hand, I am surprised that we in Saxony have managed to find an alternative path at all in such a bureaucratized German system.

Ines Röhrborn: Yes, thank you very much. I've now got a desire to read because I realize that there's a lot of heart in it, that there really is a lot of history between the lines, including international history, and of course the protagonists or authors all have one thing in common, namely to make education possible and of course to release teachers, good teachers, into practice and to find ways for children and young people to experience education. So I think it's a book that is well worth reading. It was a pleasure to have Mr. Axel Germann here today on my left and Dr. Peggy Germer on my right. Thank you very, very much for being here. And that was our fourth episode of our ZLSB book podcast entitled Reading Center. We hope that you and your curiosity about this book will also develop and browse and also click so that we can count that click as well. And we would be delighted if you would listen to our next book podcast again. See you next time. We look forward to hearing from you.