Over recent decades, education policy has been preoccupied with economic growth while paying insufficient heed to global sustainability challenges. International initiatives to promote education for sustainable development (ESD) have been hampered by a lack of clarity on how to implement this form of education. To address this concern, a Rounder Sense of Purpose (RSP) began as a three-year EU-funded project that set out to develop a practical accreditation model for educators working on ESD. Expert and user opinion was sought through several rounds of structured consultation with over 500 people, chiefly using a Delphi approach, to develop and validate the model. The resulting framework comprises 12 competences, each with three learning outcomes and several underpinning components. This is supported by a range of activities largely reflecting a constructivist pedagogy. A range of assessment techniques have also been piloted within the project although this remains an area for further enquiry. Ultimately, it was decided not to design a single qualification template because defining the award to such a level of detail would make it more difficult to apply across multiple jurisdictions. Partners also felt that such an approach would atomize learning in a way that runs counter to the holistic principles of sustainability. RSP provided a rich learning experience for those involved and has already demonstrated its potential to extend its impact well beyond the original participants.

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This multinational research study was carried out between 2004 and 2006 in four teacher education institutions in Cyprus, England, Switzerland, and Germany. With the help of a written questionnaire, the confidence and perceived competence of preservice primary teachers (N = 690) to deliver biodiversity education in school were investigated. Data were triangulated with findings from a previous stage of the overall research project. Study participants' confidence to carry out certain outdoor activities in school increased with the number of similar experiences they had during their own secondary school education, and the more personal classroom experiences they had during their teacher education. A sound knowledge of local wild organisms strongly added to their confidence. However, preservice teachers' perceived competence, and thus motivation to implement biodiversity education later on in school, was related even more strongly to the extent of preparation they had received during their teacher education. The results indicate that teacher education programmes that focus exclusively on filling (biodiversity) knowledge gaps might fail to raise confidence and competence in their students to carry out biodiversity education in school. Programmes that have a higher possibility of attaining effectiveness in biodiversity education seek to strike a balance between background knowledge development, pedagogical content knowledge, and opportunities during teaching practice that leads to experiential gains in enacting meaningful activity sequences and engaging students in holistic educational innovations. Within such programmes, it would be fruitful to further explore the relationship between confidence, perceived competence, and actual teaching performance.

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Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is a demanding new field in terms of content and context and requires whole-school approaches and changes in educational structures. The field's implementation constitutes a great challenge for teachers, novice in the field of ESD. Teacher education for ESD needs to effectively transfer knowledge and skills related to the concepts of sustainable development and reflect the relation of ESD to values education, systemic thinking and an interdisciplinary approach. The teaching methods employed by teacher education need to be in accordance with ESD methods and to empower teachers for integrating ESD in the teaching-learning process. For this purpose, we used a mentoring system to introduce experienced and newly appointed teachers, all novice in the field of ESD, to planning and implementing ESD and evaluated the potential of mentoring as a form of education for empowering teachers for ESD. Results highlight the value of mentoring since it encompasses all of the attributes that ESD teacher education requires in an experiential and practical form, it promotes teacher interaction and the formation of professional learning communities for ESD and it increases teachers' pedagogical content knowledge of the subject. IntroductionEffective teachers are key determinants for successful schools, and teacher professional development is vital for improving the quality of education. Continuing professional development (CPD) of teachers raises teacher performance and can follow different educational models: the training model, the award bearing model, the deficit model, the cascade model and so forth (Kennedy 2005). As the uncertainty regarding the efficacy of external courses for raising teacher performance grows (Rhodes and Beneice 2002), CPD turns to school-based educational models.The coaching/mentoring model of professional development is based on mutual teacher support and dissemination of best practices and it is largely widespread in

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