Section archive - Teacher Educators

This self-study describes the author's transition from teacher to teacher educator. During this transition, the author explored how her beliefs about mathematics teacher education influenced the work of planning and teaching a course for the first time. The transition from teacher to teacher educator is explored through the experience of a course focused on inquiry. Inquiry is embedded within the course from two perspectives: mathematical inquiry and teaching as inquiry. The author concludes that long-term goals related to reflection, career-long learning, and professional growth were what the author felt were missing in the courses she had taken as a teacher candidate, observed as a graduate student, and worked in as a teaching assistant. The tension between the short-term goals of teacher candidates and the long-term goals of the faculty was striking.

This article uses critical autoethnographic self-study methodology to examine teacher educators' dispositions toward their students. Findings illustrate the powerful positions and judgmental stances teacher educators held as they navigated their teaching as well as a need for teacher educators to devote time to deliberate critical self-study of their own dispositions.

This article focuses on the Conservative–Liberal coalition government’s policy in teacher education in England and its implications for the work of teacher educators. It argues that policies influenced by the neoliberal and neoconservative policies of past governments from the late 1970s have been continued and even accelerated by the current coalition government, with the result of a much more significant and rapid shift to more school-based and school-led initial teacher education and continuing professional development.

This article investigates the experiences of secondary teachers within their workplace as they take on the role of leading subject knowledge development days for small groups of student-teachers through a case-study approach. The findings reveal a number of professional development needs of new teacher educators situated solely in school, some similar with those situated in higher educational institutions, including fostering an understanding that modelling needs to be made explicit to student-teachers. This has important implications with the introduction of Teaching Schools with responsibilities for educating student-teachers in England.