Research

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.


March 11, 2024

Towards diversity-responsive teacher educators: reflections of a professional development initiative

In the past year, a fruitful collaboration took place between a teacher educator, Ann, and a doctoral researcher, Benjamin, regarding a professional development initiative (PDI) on […]
February 19, 2024

Creative research as a starter for professional dialogue

Creative research methods invite people in and promote professional development while participating in the research.
January 15, 2024

‘So how do you feel that lesson went?’ Patterns of discursive interaction in post-lesson debriefs

Thinking before we talk, or realising that talk is structuring thinking and thus learning, would allow for more intentional conversational choices in post-lesson debriefs.
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...

June 10, 2019

Self-Study Research in Europe

This blog shares some findings from a collaborative study1 on the positioning and development of self-study research in Europe, and complements the ‘research’ building block that is one of 13 building blocks central to the work of InFo-TED Specifically, this blog aligns with the research building block by considering what teacher educators’ engagement in research involves, and how teacher educators’ engagement in research can be meaningfully supported.
April 13, 2019

Using Research to Problematise ‘The Good Practicum’

Most student teachers have positive experiences of working in a school when on placement. A minority, however, return to university from their placement feeling stressed and anxious. In Scotland, The Donaldson Review (2011) claims that 23% of their respondents admitted to having ‘variable or very poor’ placement experiences. Problematic experiences have been reported in a range of empirical studies throughout the wider world (see for example Boz and Boz, 2006)...
March 23, 2019

How research on reflection has changed my view on reflective practice

Reflective practice is a common dimension of initial teacher education programmes throughout the world and the benefits of developing reflective teachers have been well documented (please see McGarr & McCormack, 2014 for more detail). While differing approaches to reflection exist, Brookfield (1995) argues that unless reflective practice is critical in nature, challenges hegemonic assumptions and power relations, it is largely ineffective.
February 24, 2019

Nurturing teacher educators’ communities of enquiry

Unless research is valued for its capacity as a tool of professional learning by all stakeholders in teacher education, we risk the marginalisation and eventual disappearance of a theory-informed future teaching profession. Peiser (2015) reminds us that education policy can, in some cases, prioritise instrumental knowledge over a wider professional understanding of teacher education and...
January 4, 2019

The Evidence-Based Teaching Survey

Teacher educators play a pivotal role in the classroom ecology of teacher education because they support pre-service teachers’ learning and because they model teaching through their own practices (Lunenberg, Korthagen, & Swennen, 2007). Therefore, there is no exaggeration to say that if we strive for quality teacher preparation we should first invest time and effort on the professional development of teacher educators’ (Goodwin & Kosnik, 2013).