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. Now these new structures, and the distribution of responsibilities within them, are becoming more settled in many partnerships. This also has an impact on those working within the partnerships. We are interested in what this means for the teacher educators involved ‘on the ground’. Our research concentrated on the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of our work, by listening to the challenges and dilemmas that teacher educators are experiencing in their practice, which reveal insights into the complexity of their work.

By using a narrative approach, our research investigated experiences of school- and university-based teacher educators working in initial teacher education partnerships in the Netherlands and England. Stories were collected about challenges or dilemmas in practice, which can be a rich source of professional learning and development for the narrator and for those hearing the story (Jarvis 2005). The stories included aspects of practice that fell into four key themes: guiding and assessing student-teachers; professionalism, growth and well-being; collaborative working in partnerships; and quality of teacher education. Although the themes are not new in teacher educator partnerships (for example Ping et al. 2018), the stories reveal that the way teacher educators have to deal with them in complex partnerships now involves the consideration of multiple perspectives.

Challenges or dilemmas in practice can provide a useful trigger for teacher educators to reflect on their thinking and actions and to examine their beliefs (Tillema and Kremer-Hayon 2005). Therefore, we developed the stories into ‘tools’ with different prompts to use for professional learning and development. The tools were used in workshops with teacher educators from schools and universities in England and the Netherlands, and at international conferences. When the tools are used in groups with both school- and university-based teacher educators together, the participants found them especially helpful to explore different perspectives within the group, to develop understanding. There are often no simple solutions to the dilemmas, but the value of discussing them is the collaborative professional learning opportunity they provide to a team. This concords with the observation that learning experiences within a team or local community may be more meaningful than individual learning (Van der Klink et al. 2017).

The tools are freely available as web-based resources, in English at For Learning in Teacher Education, and will soon be available in Dutch.

Twitter: @FLiTE737

Email: FLiTE@herts.ac.uk

References

Jarvis, J. 2005. "Telling stories in class: an exploration of aspects of the use of narrative in a higher education context." Journal for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching 2(1):6-13.

Ping, C., Schellings, G. L. M. & Beijaard, D. 2018. Teacher educators' professional learning: A literature review. Teaching and Teacher Education, 75, 93-104.

Tillema, H., & Kremer-Hayon, L. (2005). Facing dilemmas: teacher-educators’ ways of constructing a pedagogy of teacher education. Teaching in Higher Education, 10(2), 203-217. doi:10.1080/1356251042000337954

Van der Klink, M., Kools, Q., Avissar, G., White, S., & Sakata, T. (2017). Professional development of teacher educators: what do they do? Findings from an explorative international study. Professional Development in Education, 43(2), 163-178. doi:10.1080/19415257.2015.1114506