Blog

We welcome new blogs on teacher educators and teacher educator development (500-750 words). For more information see our Blog submission policy or contact your national moderator.


May 12, 2020

Being and Becoming A Research-Active Teacher Educator

It’s April 2020 and I’m writing this at home in lockdown during the Covid 19 pandemic. In these terrible times, one of my ways of maintaining a semblance of ‘normal life’ is to take refuge in my research, an enjoyable and – usually - productive process for me. But this was not always so. In my early years as a teacher educator, I struggled to research and write. A brief autobiography will explain why.I entered teacher education, straight from school teaching...

May 12, 2020

How Corona relates to educational change: An impetus for ICT-based teacher education

It’s April 2020 and I’m writing this at home in lockdown during the Covid 19 pandemic. In these terrible times, one of my ways of maintaining a semblance of ‘normal life’ is to take refuge in my research, an enjoyable and – usually - productive process for me. But this was not always so. In my early years as a teacher educator, I struggled to research and write...

May 12, 2020

Supporting Do-It-Yourself video-based teachers’ professional learning

Focus on short videotaped episodes, find critical moments and examine them through predefined perspectives. These are the core instructions of a Do It Yourself (DIY) tool for analyzing self-filmed classroom videos currently being developed. Many teacher educators consider classroom video to be an important resource that supports high-quality professional learning (Marsh & Mitchell, 2014). Videos provide rich data, and are easily filmed with smartphones.

March 5, 2020

Educating teachers for innovative education: Every day is different, every school is different

As a 19-year-old girl, I used to work at a bank during summer holidays. For three weeks I was a desk staff member and I helped customers with foreign currencies, to place funds and make cash withdrawals. At that time there were no cash machines yet. The job I experienced was not at all exciting. At the beginning of the day, I knew exactly what was going to happen. I knew which forms I had to hand in at the end of the day to be sent to the head office. It did not take me long to realize I did not have any aspiration to work as a bank employee.

March 5, 2020

Teacher educators as committed professionals

In August 2018 Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg staged a protest outside the Riksdag, holding a sign "Skolstrejk för klimatet". This was the spark to an international movement of pupils who take time off from class to demonstrate and demand political action to prevent further climate change. In 2019 this movement reached Belgium: between February and May pupils went on strike and demonstrated in Brussels and other major towns. At first these weekly demonstrations stimulated the debate on climate change and the growing political awareness of a new generation. The ‘climate truants’...

January 20, 2020

Voices of Teacher Educators: Preparing the Next Generation of Teacher Educators

As the landscape of teacher education continues to shift towards emphasizing program coherence and highly integrated clinical practice, so too does the work of teacher educators working in higher education. The emphasis on linking to the clinical context requires collaboration between school and university-based teacher educators’ to systematically and intentionally link theory, research, and practice to support teacher candidate learning. This preparation requires creating third spaces...

December 7, 2019

The team member role and ways of becoming ‘in-service’

We all want to be ‘in-service’ in qualitatively good ways. InFo-TED's conceptual model for teacher educators, shows that we pass through several phases before we are ‘in-service’. This specific part of the complex conceptual model distinguishes the phases of career-long learning as follows...

From the ‘pre-initial’ phase, just recruited and on the doorstep of becoming a teacher educator, one moves to the ‘initial phase’. After maybe one to two years the next...

November 17, 2019

Registration deepens and connects

Experiences with Velon Professional Registration for Teacher Educators. Velon (Association for Teacher Educators in the Netherlands) is committed to the quality of individual teacher educators and to the quality of the professional group. Velon manages, among other things, the professional register for teacher educators. The aim of registration is a recognition of the quality of teacher educators’ work. As chair of Velon, I couldn't stay behind. it was time for me to register and it seemed best to do that together...

October 26, 2019

LGBTQI+ Diversity Work in Teacher Education

Mirroring many contexts internationally, Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) has been undergoing a process of review in the Republic of Ireland. A significant aspect of this review concerns the heretofore exclusion of LGBTQI+ people. Following written submissions and a series of meetings with relevant stakeholders, the cross-party parliamentary committee charged with the first stage of this review has recommended that RSE: be fully inclusive of LGBTQI+ [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex +] relationships and experiences including...