Educating Teacher Educators: International Perspectives

Abstract

Almost two decades ago, I wrote an article about teacher educators, which I titled "Learning and unlearning: The education of teacher educators" (Cochran-Smith, 2003). The editors of this issue of The New Educator, which focuses on the preparation of teacher educators, invited me to reflect back on the 2003 article and then comment on how teacher educators are currently being prepared in the US and in selected other countries where I have worked with teacher educators in various capacities. I invited three senior colleagues in teacher education from New Zealand, Israel, and Norway (Lexie Grudnoff, Lily Orland-Barak, and Kari Smith, respectively) to join me. This article provides a sense of the intriguing variations among these quite different countries as well as some of the central questions that cut across them. Learning and Unlearning: Looking BackAs I noted in my 2003 article, despite ongoing critique of university teacher education programs and despite the growth of alternate routes into teaching, at that time, responsibility for preparing most of the nation's teachers rested primarily with teacher education programs at higher education institutions. This meant that whether by design or default, teacher educatorsthe people who taught teachers-were assumed to be the linchpins in many educational reforms, expected to ensure that all teachers could teach to new P-12 curriculum standards, integrate technology into the curriculum, meet the needs of the increasingly diverse school population, prepare students to pass new high stakes tests linked to funding and policy decisions, and respond to many other demands. In the article I pointed to the disparity between the multiple demands placed on teacher educators and the lack of attention to a course of study for teacher educator preparation or to policies that would create the conditions to support their ongoing

Finnish teacher educators’ preferences for their professional development – quantitative exploration

“…Teacher educators' professional development has recently received increasing interest worldwide (e.g. Cochran et al 2019;Tack and Vanderlinde 2014;Kelchtermans, Smith, and Vanderlinde 2017;Tack et al 2018). Our article is a continuation of our previous qualitative studies and presents a quantitative study of Finnish teacher educators (Maaranen et al 2019(Maaranen et al , 2018.…”

From teacher to senior teacher educator: exploring the teaching-research nexus in Israeli Academic Colleges of Education

“…Teaching-Research Nexus (TRN) is defined as one of the main characteristics of academic orientation. It includes a number of definitions, relating to patterns of developing teaching methods based on academic research (la Velle 2019), using academic resources for personal learning and professional development (Cochran-Smith et al 2020;Griffiths 2014 Q10 ), conducting research into pedagogy and teaching methods (Czerniawski, Guberman, and MacPhail 2017), generation of new knowledge from research (la Velle and Flores 2018); and identifying opportunities for research collaboration (Douglas 2013).…”

“…Nonetheless, many Israeli ACEs still define themselves as challenged in this regard, and the factors that inhibit them include the lack of socialisation for research (Cochran-Smith et al 2020), the intra-organisational culture that does not fully support research (Hofman and Niederland 2012), and the lack of internationalisation (Yemini et al 2017). In metaphorical terms, the predominant spirit of these institutions is of a small resource-poor town compared to a large city with the facilities to produce up-to-date academic knowledge.…”

Teaching quality, social mobility and ‘opportunity’ in England: the case of the teaching and leadership innovation fund

“…As education continues to be framed as a 'key driver of economic and social success' (Machin 2006, 7), there is an increasing emphasis on issues of accountability and responsibility, both within schools and in teacher preparation. Cochran-Smith et al (2020) observe how teacher educators 'are often explicitly or implicitly held accountable for teacher quality and are frequently blamed when school students do not meet national or international expectations' (Cochran-Smith et al 2020, 5). Such debates also highlight issues of context and equity: Should a teacher who is working in a challenging school with at-risk students be measured by the same yardstick as a teacher who is working in a high-achieving school in a middle-class suburb?…”