Future Selves Shape How Student Teachers Become Teachers, Study Finds

Every student teacher carries two invisible companions into the classroom: the teacher they dream of becoming and the teacher they dread turning into. A new study published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications suggests that these imagined futures are not idle fantasies but powerful psychological instruments that actively steer how novice teachers behave, reflect, and construct their professional identities during the most vulnerable stage of their training. The research, conducted by Tuba Demirkol, Gülşah Tıkız Ertürk, and Hakan Demiröz at the Social Sciences University of Ankara, offers one of the most detailed longitudinal portraits to date of how prospective English language teachers negotiate the gap between who they are and who they hope, or fear, they might become.

The study is grounded in Possible Selves Theory, a psychological framework originally developed to explain how future-oriented self-conceptions organize human motivation. According to the theory, individuals maintain mental representations of what they would like to become, what they could become, and what they are afraid of becoming. These representations act as incentives and standards against which present behavior is evaluated. While the framework has been applied extensively in career development and education research, the authors note that most previous investigations in teacher education have relied on cross-sectional designs, capturing a single snapshot of trainees’ self-conceptions rather than tracing how those self-conceptions evolve over time. The new research addresses this gap by embedding its inquiry directly into the practicum, the compulsory school-based placement widely regarded as the crucible of professional identity formation for beginning teachers.

To capture this developmental process, the researchers adopted a phenomenological qualitative design and followed six final-year students enrolled in an English language and literature program at a Turkish university across a twelve-week compulsory practicum. The participants, all adults over eighteen, were observed in real classroom settings while completing their teaching placements, and their experiences were documented through three complementary data sources: structured observation tasks, written reflection papers produced throughout the placement, and focus group interviews conducted with the group. This triangulated approach allowed the researchers to compare what the trainees did in classrooms, what they wrote privately about their experiences, and what they articulated collectively when discussing their development with peers.

The data were analyzed thematically, and two overarching themes emerged from the analysis: fragile instructional self-efficacy and ambivalent professional identity. The first theme captures the precarious confidence that the pre-service teachers felt about their own teaching abilities. Classroom practice confronted them with the distance between their theoretical preparation and the unpredictable realities of live instruction, and their reflections repeatedly revealed uncertainty about whether they could translate knowledge into effective teaching. The second theme, ambivalent professional identity, reflects the trainees’ simultaneously positive and negative orientations toward the teaching profession itself, an oscillation between attraction to the role and doubt about belonging within it.

Beneath these themes, the study mapped a strikingly symmetrical architecture of hope and fear. The participants’ ideal selves were associated with three clusters of aspiration: pedagogical competence, meaning the desire to teach skillfully and responsively; student engagement, meaning the wish to connect with learners and animate their classrooms; and professional recognition, meaning the ambition to be seen as a legitimate, respected member of the teaching community. Their feared selves, by contrast, clustered around concerns over classroom management, the dread of losing control of a room of students; ineffective teaching, the fear of failing to produce learning despite effort; and professional stagnation, the anxiety of becoming a teacher who stops growing.

What makes these findings conceptually significant is the dual function the researchers identified for these future-oriented self-conceptions. The ideal selves operated as motivational drivers, pulling the trainees toward specific behaviors and sustaining effort when practice became difficult. The feared selves operated as preventive safeguards, functioning as cautionary reference points that shaped what the trainees tried to avoid in their own classrooms. A student teacher anxious about classroom management, for example, might over-prepare routines and scripts; one aspiring to student engagement might experiment with interactive techniques despite initial discomfort. In this way, both the hoped-for and dreaded selves served as standards that influenced moment-to-moment teaching behavior and, cumulatively, the construction of a professional identity.

The longitudinal, practicum-embedded design is what elevates the study beyond much of the existing literature. Because the researchers traced the same six participants across twelve weeks, they could observe the dynamic interplay between current, ideal, and feared selves as it unfolded in real time. The trainees’ current selves, their sense of who they were as teachers at each moment, were continually measured against the imagined futures, and the discrepancies between the two were precisely where reflection, anxiety, and growth concentrated. This process-oriented account, the authors argue, captures dimensions of identity development that cross-sectional studies, which sample different individuals at a single point in time, systematically overlook.

The Turkish English-as-a-foreign-language context of the study adds an important dimension for the international field. Teacher identity research has historically been dominated by Anglophone settings, and evidence from other educational cultures helps establish which dynamics are universal and which are locally conditioned. While the study is explicitly a case study of six participants and does not claim statistical generalizability, its phenomenological depth provides a rich, contextualized account of how identity formation proceeds within a specific teacher education system, one in which the practicum is a compulsory and formative component of professional preparation.

The practical implications reach directly into the design of teacher education programs. The findings suggest that structured reflection and mentor-supported practicum experiences may foster more intentional and adaptive identity construction. If future selves function as motivational and regulatory reference points, then teacher educators can deliberately harness them: reflection assignments that ask trainees to articulate their ideal and feared selves, mentoring conversations that revisit those self-conceptions as classroom experience accumulates, and practicum structures that give novices safe opportunities to test aspirational behaviors against real classroom feedback. Rather than treating identity as a byproduct of training, programs could treat it as an explicit object of development.

The study also carries a broader message about the psychology of professional beginnings. The months in which a novice first stands before a classroom are not merely a period of skill acquisition; they are a period in which the self is actively negotiated, with imagined futures serving as both compass and warning. By showing that pre-service teachers’ ideal and feared selves evolve in tandem with their current self-assessments during practicum, the research invites teacher educators, and perhaps mentors in many professions, to take seriously the stories trainees tell about who they might become. Those stories, the Ankara team’s work indicates, are not decoration on the process of becoming a teacher. They are the process itself, and attending to them may be one of the most powerful levers available for shaping the teachers of the future.

Subject of Research: Professional identity development of pre-service English teachers through Possible Selves Theory during the teaching practicum

Article Title: Mapping future selves in language teacher education: a case study of identity development during practicum

Article References: Mapping future selves in language teacher education: a case study of identity development during practicum. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41599-026-09330-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41599-026-09330-1

Keywords: Possible Selves Theory, teacher identity, pre-service teachers, practicum, English language teaching, EFL, teacher education, self-efficacy, qualitative research, phenomenology, professional development, reflective practice