Examining the Professional Learning of Teacher Educators

• In Event: International Perspectives on the Professional Development of Teacher Educators in Contemporary University Contexts

Abstract

Problem and Objectives
This paper discusses the value of developing a pedagogy of teacher education (Korthagen & Kessels, 1999) as a purposeful approach to supporting the professional learning of teacher educators. A pedagogy of teacher education is based on the view that the teaching of teaching requires special skills, knowledge, and abilities that need to be recognized, developed, and refined by teacher educators as they become more expert at both teaching and learning about teaching. A pedagogy of teacher education involves making the pedagogical reasoning that underpins quality practice clear, explicit, and meaningful for learners of teaching. Therefore, the learning about teaching is considered to revolve around teacher educators’ ability to create pedagogical experiences and conditions that illustrate the importance of making the tacit dimensions of knowledge of practice explicit and meaningful for oneself and others.
A pedagogy of teacher education requires teacher educators to 1) explicitly ‘unpack’ for student-teachers the pedagogical expertise that allows examination of practice to push beyond the technical while still responding to the need to develop and display appropriate attitudes, knowledge, and skills of teaching itself; and, 2) be sensitive and responsive to the two competing agendas most student teachers face: their need to be comfortable with, and capable of, handling particular aspects and skills in teaching; and the need for them to see and comprehend the overall complexity of practice so that they can focus on not only what is taught but also how and why. A pedagogy of teacher education encompasses the knowledge, skills, and practices that meld the teaching and learning of teaching into a coherent whole (Loughran, 2006). In so doing, it offers a model for the professional learning of the teacher educators themselves.

Methods and Significance
Using a meta-analysis of documented self-studies of enacting a pedagogy of teacher education (Russell, 2007), this paper explores what it means to develop a pedagogy of teacher education as an approach to professional learning for teacher educators. Teaching and learning about teaching must be conceptualized as more than an uneasy alliance of theory and practice—and must instead explicitly illustrate the importance of practice and theory as being in a synergistic relationship. The development of knowledge of practice is equally important in the teaching of teaching as it is in the learning of teaching, and teacher educators are at the heart of that endeavor. Teacher educators—as practitioners of teaching teachers and learning about teaching—must be able to articulate and demonstrate the complex nature of practice if teaching itself is to be more highly prized and valued. This paper therefore opens up the professional learning of teacher educators by articulating what such a pedagogy look like, offering empirical examples of it in practice, and locating it within the complex contexts of contemporary university teacher education in Australia and elsewhere.

Author

• J. John Loughran, Monash University