Social change

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

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...
September 18, 2019

Learning to teach starts with “learning to look”

How student teachers learn to teach has been dominated by the idea that the “knowledge of teaching is acquired and developed by the personal experience of teaching” (Munby, Russell, and Martin (2001, p.587). Of course, this is an important part of how new teachers learn how to teach, though I am also interested in the value of the pre-practicum phase and how this contributes to their knowledge of how to teach. Specifically, I have become interested in the contribution teacher educators’ modelling of teaching strategies and behaviours can make...
September 8, 2019

Looking at Educational Improvement from a Lifelong Learning Perspective

A decline of a country’s test scores in international comparative tests (PISA, TIMSS) usually initiates a nationwide discussion that eventually results in questioning the quality of teacher education and teacher educators. To explain the lower achievement of pupils on these tests, a couple of things come under attack, firstly, the curriculum and the school system, secondly the quality of teachers...
August 5, 2019

SHOW YOURSELF! Video-selfies for feedback

Collecting valid and trustworthy feedback on participants’ learning is essential for good professional development. Furthermore we believe it is time to radically reconsider the taken for granted use of anonymous written feedback if we want to take participants’ professionalism seriously. Therefore we designed and implemented a format with video-selfies during the InFo-TED Summer Academy –an international weeklong program for professionals engaged in teacher educator development (July 2018).
July 1, 2019

Challenges in practice experienced by school- and university-based teacher educators

Teacher educators have been working in partnerships between schools and higher education institutions, to provide initial teacher education, for many years. The context for these partnerships is evolving due to external expectations, government-driven initiatives and developments within the profession. The increased focus on school-based teacher education resulted in changes in partnership structure.
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.
June 3, 2019

Standards – promoting or preventing professional development?

One of the major quantum leaps in teaching and teacher education in the last 50 years is, in my opinion, related to what Cochran-Smith (2004) calls the learning focus period which took place between 1980–2000. Teacher education focused mainly on developing teachers’ critical reflections on theory, practical skills, and teaching experience, to prepare them to make independent, situated decisions in the classroom. Teachers were encouraged to engage in systematic reflection such as action research...
May 25, 2019

Teacher Educators’ challenge to remain current to support others in their development

The Salamanca Statement (UNESCO, 1994) highlighted that every child was entitled to an education and stressed the importance of inclusion internationally. The Warnock Report (1978) outlined the importance of addressing special education needs (SEN) and working towards a more inclusive education approach. Furthermore, the Special Education Needs and Disability (SEND) Code of Practice: 0 – 25 (2015) in the United Kingdom (UK), highlights...
March 31, 2019

New ways of governance: can teacher educators take responsibility?

One aspect of social change is how conceptions about good government and governance change. It is reported that teacher educators and teacher education in general experience that government policy is constraining their pedagogical space for professional discourse , diversity and curriculum development by rolling national agendas of standardisation and centralisation and by their focus on standardized test scores (Swennen & Volman, 2016; Zeichner, 2016).
December 4, 2017

The teacher educator as an agent of (social) change

Reflections on the purpose of research in teacher education

Spending some leftover hours at Oslo Gardermoen on an early Thursday morning, waiting for my airplane to Amsterdam, seems like a good opportunity...