Facilitating self-study of teacher education practices: toward a pedagogy of teacher educator professional development

Abstract

This article reports on a two-year study of a self-study research group facilitation. The research group was designed as a professional development project in which six experienced teacher educators investigated their practices using a self-study approach. The pedagogical rationale of the facilitation was based on four broadly shared theoretical principles on how teacher educators can effectively work on their professional development. These theoretical principles were translated in a series of propositions (‘if … then …’) making clear the implications these principles held for the interventions of facilitators of teacher educator professional development. Qualitative content analysis of the audiotapes of the research group meetings, the facilitators’ logbooks and all the written materials produced during the project serves as an empirical validation and refinement of these principles. The findings are presented as amendments to the original propositions. By interpretatively discussing why these propositions functioned as they did in practice, we contribute to the development of a pedagogy of teacher educator professional development.

Keywords:

• professional development
• teacher educator
• self-study research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Flanders has a dual system in higher education, with universities offering research-based academic training, and different institutes for higher education (i.e. higher education colleges and centers for adult education) providing programs for professional training. Although the institutes for higher education have recently started to develop research expertise, this expertise mainly consists of applied forms of research, while their core business remains the education of teachers. Fundamental and theory-oriented research has traditionally occurred within the universities. As such, teaching and research in Flemish teacher education have been historically and institutionally separated and conducted by different people with different backgrounds and expertise. But even in systems where teaching and research in teacher education were structurally integrated, combining both was found to be difficult and a source of tension (e.g. between the different agendas and the required skills and knowledge). An example is the work of the Arizona Group (for example, Guilfoyle 1995, Guilfoyle et al. 1995) whose members found themselves confronted by an ongoing difficulty in understanding the unspoken rules for tenure in academia (i.e. the hierarchy in different forms of research, with specific pedagogical research on teacher education practices featuring very low on that scale). Clearly then, a subgoal and an important precondition for the success of this project was developing participants’ research skills and nurturing an interrogating stance to practice. However, their development as researchers falls beyond the scope of this article.

2. This definition of professional development is to be situated in the teacher-thinking research tradition (Clark and Peterson 1986, Richardson and Placier 2001), which has highlighted how teachers’ acting can only be adequately understood (and hence developed) when taking into account their thinking (knowledge and beliefs).

3. All participants received five ‘invitation wild cards’ that they could give to colleagues from their teacher training institute. In this way we assembled an audience of about 40 people that operated as an ad interim audience between the research group meetings on the one hand and the more general, open public on the other.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders.