Research into, surrounding and concerning teacher education is highly diversified. This is reflected in, for example, the large number of approx. 90 chairs and professorships that are integrated with their teams in the Bamberg Centre for Teacher Training (ZLB).
The ZLB members in specialist disciplines and didactic disciplines as well as educational sciences are involved in various projects, plans and alliances. Teacher education at the University of Bamberg is therefore integrated with numerous areas of research.

• Teacher training is largely embedded in specialist disciplines in the available teaching subjects. The latest research findings and research trends in the specialist disciplines enrich and inform the teacher training programmes to the point of dovetailing teaching and research for the purpose of research-based learning.

• Didactic research is specific to subjects and learning areas and focuses on the communication of content and the facilitation of competence development in a learning area in dedicated teaching-learning settings. The object of research is to adapt individual learning objects, methods and requirements to the learners, to address their cognitive and comprehension processes, and to develop competence models for specific learning areas. This also includes the discipline-specific development and empirical evaluation of instructional approaches and teaching strategies from kindergarten to university teaching.

• Questions of education, professionalism and professionalisation of teachers have become increasingly important following the findings of major international comparative studies, such as PISA, IGLU, etc. Research into teacher training focuses on researching teaching as a discipline and as a profession and on the competence orientation of professional teaching approaches in heterogeneous and challenging pedagogical contexts. The objective is a stronger foundation of university education programmes and the evidence-based refinement of study programmes as well as further education and training measures.

• Research on the integration of theory and practice aims to “enable teachers to make use of their theoretical knowledge for the analysis and design of the professional field” (German Science and Humanities Council, 2001). With regard to a scientific, theory-guided and self-reflective acquisition of experience in practice, procedural knowledge is the subject of research as an element of the expertise of teachers and student teachers in the context of school internships – e.g. in collaboration with partner schools of academia – in accordance with situational requirements..

• Schools, universities and other educational institutions are not only places of learning and teaching but they are also organisations. Thus, educational institutions can be understood to be systems that are affiliated with different associations, networks and institutions and are thus subject to programmatic and social transformation processes. Development research takes the development concepts of the institutions as its starting point and pursues the goal of research-based, systematic quality assurance.