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Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text., Purpose How mentors shape their mentoring is strongly influenced by their personal beliefs about the goals and purpose of mentoring, the possible activities associated with it, who decides on the focus of the mentoring relationship, and the strategies mentors choose to enact these beliefs in practice. In accordance with the personal interpretative framework, the authors operationalized mentors’ beliefs as professional self-understanding (the what) and subjective educational theory (the how) of teaching and sought to identify different mentoring positions. Method Using a qualitative approach, the authors conducted semistructured interviews between December 2017 and January 2018 with 18 undergraduate mentors from Maastricht University in Maastricht, the Netherlands. The aim of the interviews was to reconstruct their personal interpretative framework. Before building a general pattern of explanation in a cross-case analysis, the authors performed a within-case analysis of the data, analyzing individual mentors. Results This approach resulted in the identification and description of 4 mentoring positions: the (1) facilitator (service providing and responsive), (2) coach (development supporting and responsive), (3) monitor (signaling and collaborative), and (4) exemplar (service providing or development supporting and directive). Each position represents a coherent pattern of normative beliefs about oneself as a mentor (professional self-understanding) and how to enact these beliefs in practice (subjective educational theory). Conclusions Awareness of their mentoring position can help mentors understand why they act the way they do in certain situations and how this behavior affects their mentees’ learning and development. It can also help mentors identify personal learning needs and, consequently, provide opportunities for faculty development.

This paper examines the cumulative effects on teacher educators of a series of ideological and policy changes in the English teacher education landscape since the early 80s. We argue that these rapid changes have marginalized the role of the university in teacher learning and resulted in narrower, more instrumental forms of teacher education. Within this landscape we see a distinct need to re-state (and reinstate) the importance of higher education-based teacher educators, and to reclaim and celebrate their practices and the nature of the professionalism involved. We invite the reader to rethink teacher educator professionalism as what is enacted by teacher educators, as engaged in their professional activities. A view of enacted professionalism gives central stage to and trusts the professional judgement of teacher educators to do what they deem is good, appropriate, or best – understood in a broad sense – to support the professional learning of newcomers in the profession.

Background Essential to the professional development of mentors is making explicit and critically challenging the knowledge and beliefs underpinning their mentoring practice. This paper reports on the development of a survey instrument called MERIT, MEntor Reflection InstrumenT, which was designed to support mentors’ systematic reflection on the how, what and why of their practice. Methods In 2019, a twenty-item survey instrument was developed and piloted. Initial validation data (N = 228) were collected by distributing the survey through the authors’ network. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted and internal consistency reliability coefficients were calculated. Results The Principal Axis EFA with Direct Oblimin rotation (Delta = 0) resulted in four factors: 1) supporting personal development, 2) modelling professional development, 3) fostering autonomy, and 4) monitoring performance. The four factors explained 43% of the total variance of item scores. The Cronbach’s alphas for the subscale scores were between .42 and .75. Conclusions The MERIT can help mentors reflect on their beliefs and professional knowhow. These reflections can serve as input for the faculty development initiatives mentors undertake, which may ultimately improve their knowledge and skills as a mentor.

This chapter describes and problematises the conception of teacher professionalism enacted in current teacher education policy in Flanders (Belgium). The entry point for the analysis is the Decree on teacher education of 2018 and its surrounding policy measures which not only resulted in a large restructuring of the landscape for initial teacher education in Flanders, but also articulate a particular normative discourse about what it means to be and become a teacher today. After a brief contextualisation of the Decree in the policy measures that have preceded it, we (re)construct the particular discourse of teacher professionalism enacted in current policy legislation in three key premises: professionalism is a quality acquired, possessed and performed by individual teachers; professionalism is knowing and performing ‘what works’; and professionalism can be mapped and checked. The chapter concludes with drawing critical attention to the implication of this discourse by pointing out two blind spots. In framing teacher professionalism as an individual possession, policy highlights for our attention individual knowledge, skills and attitudes, but risks minimising the importance of contextual factors in understanding ‘success’ or ‘failure’ in teaching. The assumption of professionalism as a technical quality emphasizes questions about ‘what works/does not work’, but deflects attention away from the more fundamental normative question ‘what it should work for’ that teachers grapple with in their practice.

Research is widely acknowledged as a key element of professional learning for intending and serving teachers, as well as for their teacher educators. And yet, despite this centrality, research in teacher education is often subjected to critique and contestation. Internationally, the quality of such research has been questioned, and there are on-going issues about when, how and why teacher educators and teachers (can) engage in research. Initiatives to build research capacity in teacher education thus remain of crucial importance. Here we focus on this issue, aiming to analyse how to strengthen the field of teacher education locally and internationally. We first set out a conceptual framework for considering capacity building, and then analyse three international examples of practice in teacher education research: the Norwegian Doctoral School (NAFOL); the use of self-study research in Belgium (Flanders); and the Teacher Education Research Network (TERN), a social practices initiative in England. The contextualised analysis of these local capacity-building initiatives exemplifies what factors influence their enactments and outcomes and, in so doing, also inform a more ‘glocal’ understanding of how to build research capacity in and on teacher education. From this follows our overall question: what can be learned from these cases about how to build research capacity in and on teacher education? Norsk sammendrag Norsk tittel: Forskningskapasitetsbygging i og pa laererutdanning: utviklingspraksis og laering Forskning er anerkjent som et sentralt element i profesjonell laering for laererstudenter, laerere og for laererutdannere. Likevel blir forskning i laererutdanningen ofte utsatt for kritikk og bestridelse. Internasjonalt blir det stilt sporsmal ved kvaliteten pa forskningen, og det er en pagaende diskusjon om nar, hvordan og hvorfor laererutdannere og laerere (kan) involvere(r) seg i forskning. Initiativ for a utvikle forskerkapasitet i laererutdanningene er saledes av avgjorende betydning. Artikkelen fokuserer pa denne problemstillingen, med mal om a analysere hvordan man kan styrke feltet for laererutdanning lokalt og internasjonalt. Forst presenteres et konseptuelt rammeverk for a vurdere kapasitetsbygging, for tre internasjonale eksempler av praksis i laererutdanningsforskning analyseres: Nasjonal forskerskole for laererutdanning (NAFOL); bruken av self-study forskning i Belgia (Flandern); og Forskningsnettverk i laererutdanning (TERN), som er et prosjektinitiativ om sosial praksis i England. Den kontekstualiserte analysen av disse lokale kapasitetsbyggingsinitiativene eksemplifiserer hvilke faktorer som pavirker deres vedtak og utfall, og informerer pa denne maten ogsa om en mer ‘glokal’ forstaelse av hvordan man bygger en forskningskapasitet i og pa laererutdanningene. Av dette folger vart overordnede sporsmal: hva kan laeres av disse tre casene om hvordan bygge forskningskapasitet i og pa laererutdanning?

A review of the field of practice-focused research in Initial Teacher Education (ITE) reveals four broad genres of qualitative research: case studies of teacher education programs and developments; research into student teacher experience and learning; inquiry into teacher educators’ own learning, identity, and beliefs; and conceptual or theory-building research. This is an eclectic field that is defined by variation in methodologies rather than by a few clearly identifiable research approaches. What practice-focused research in ITE has in common, though, is a desire on the behalf of teacher educator researchers to understand the complexity of teacher education and contribute to shifts in practice, for the benefit of student teachers and, ultimately, for learners in schools and early childhood education. In this endeavor, teacher educator researchers are presented with a challenge to achieve a balance between goals of local relevance and making a theoretical contribution to the broader field. This is a persistent tension. Notwithstanding the capacity for practice-focused research to achieve a stronger balance and greater relevance beyond the local, key contributions of practice-focused research in ITE include: highlighting the importance of context, questioning what might be understood by “improvement” in teacher education and schooling, and pushing back against research power structures that undervalue practice-focused research. Drawing on a painting metaphor, each genre represents a collection of sketches of practice-focused research in ITE that together provide the viewer with an overview of the field. However, these genres are not mutually exclusive categories as any particular research study (or sketch) might be placed within one or more groupings; for example, inquiry into teacher educators’ own learning often also includes attention to student teachers’ experiences and case studies of teacher education initiatives inevitably draw on theory to frame the research and make sense of findings. Also, overviewing the field and identifying relevant research is not as simple as it might first appear, given challenges in identifying research undertaken by teacher educators, differences in the positioning of teacher educators within different educational systems, and privileging of American (US) views of teacher education in published research, which was counteracted in a small way in this review by explicitly including voices located outside this dominant setting. Examples of different types of qualitative research projects illustrate issues in teacher education that matter to teacher educator researchers globally and locally and how they have sought to use a variety of methodologies to understand them. The examples also show how teacher educators themselves define what is important in teacher education research, often through small-scale studies of context-specific teacher education problems and practices, and how there is value in “smaller story” research that supports understanding of both universals and particularities along with the grand narratives of teacher education.

Elien’s self-study project is rooted in some frustrating experiences in her role as the internship coordinator at the bachelor program of early childhood education at Thomas More University College. Year after year, she noticed that student teachers did not make use of the conceptual frameworks and tools from the theoretical courses in the program during their internship practice. “You go to great lengths to tell student teachers how to teach and yet they are not able or willing to translate those insights into their practice.” One measure to “bridge” the theory-practice gap adopted in many teacher education programs, including the program Elien teaches on, is creating structured assignments that student teachers are expected to implement and analyze during internships. Assignments are designed to encourage students to study their teaching practice and reflectively connect the frameworks from theoretical courses with what happens in schools (Kelchtermans G: De kloof voorbij. Naar een betere integratie van theorie en praktijk in de lerarenopleiding. Rapport opgesteld in opdracht van de Vlaamse Onderwijsraad [Getting beyond the theory-practice gap. A report for the Flemish Educational Council]. VLOR, Brussels, 2003). However, more often than not, student teachers execute these assignments as routinized tasks, reducing the value of reflection on practice to the need to complete the assignment and “move on” with “what really matters,” that is, doing the practice of the internship. They do not seem to get the purpose of the assignments to actually contribute to the improvement of their own practice or situation. These observations formed the starting point for Elien’s self-study project.

“If you’re good at something, if you really master the content, teaching seems to work much better. Students give you the feeling that you have something valuable to offer because you exude expertise. They show interest. It seems like you can only really be a teacher if you’re holding expertise in a particular area.” These words are taken from the opening paragraph of Koen’s self-study research report. Koen is an experienced teacher educator with a background in general education. His students in the teacher education program of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at the University of Leuven generally gave him the feeling of “being a teacher” described above, as he used to readily illustrate his courses with “real-life” examples from his own career as a teacher or his experiences as a father. With his students in the bachelor program of physical education at Odisee University College, however, Koen had to come a long way in developing content knowledge. For a few years, he helped his colleagues with the basic motoric skills test during the introductory days for first-year students of the physical education program. The first glimpse students get from him is that of a teacher in sportswear holding a stopwatch. Koen enjoys the anticipation with which students look at him, wondering about the quality of their physical performance. When students later ask him curiously about his sports discipline, he notices a sense of disenchantment. “No, I don’t have a sports background, I’m an educationist.” That very moment, it feels like a myth is being dispelled. It makes Koen wonder about the extent to which he can still be of interest to his students. Does he display enough expertise or mastery to be able to teach them?

Before his retirement, Ludo worked as a teacher educator in the teacher education program of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at the University of Leuven for over 10 years. A central component of the program is the student teaching internship. Roughly halfway into the internship, Ludo visits his student teachers in schools and observes a lesson. After this lesson, his observations are debriefed in the supervisory conference with the student teacher. He has a very clear understanding of what his role should be during post-observation supervisory conferences: facilitating student teachers’ self-reflective analysis of their teaching experiences. Yet, in his actual practice, Ludo felt he did not always live up to that ideal and his unease with his enactment of supervisory conferences grew over the years. He noticed how he often switched from his deeply valued reflective approach to a more directive approach or a problem-solving, result-driven, technical debriefing of the lesson. He was taken aback by the “master” in him, who very skillfully and diligently tells the student teacher how to (better) deal with a particular situation. This unease and his self-critical reflections formed the starting points for Ludo’s self-study project.

In this section, we will present the experiences and findings from the first systematic project of self-study of teacher education practices in Flanders (Belgium), entitled “Learning and facilitating learning in the workplace: A project of self-study in teacher education.” This chapter sets the scene and orients the reader to the rest of the section. In the following paragraphs, we first describe the context of this collaborative project (section “Situating the project”) and present the protagonists and the script underlying the different acts (section “Participants and process”). In the section “Lessons on self-study facilitation,” we present a number of lessons learned from our attempts to support and facilitate a self-study research group. As such, this section aims at contributing to a pedagogy for the facilitation of self-study in teacher education practices. The fifth and final section of the chapter looks ahead and introduces the rationale behind the three following chapters. Each of the chapters reports on the content and outcome of one particular self-study of practice included in the project in the form of a retrospective “tetralogue.”

This study connects to the international call for research on teacher educator professionalism. Combining positioning theory with the personal interpretative framework, we examined the relationship between teacher educators' positioning and their teacher education practices. The interpretative analysis of qualitative data from twelve experienced Flemish teacher educators revealed three teacher educator positionings: a teacher educator of ‘pedagogues’, a teacher educator of reflective teachers, and a teacher educator of subject teachers. Each positioning constitutes a coherent pattern of normative beliefs about good teaching and teacher education, the preferred relationships with student teachers, and valuable methods and strategies to enact these beliefs. ispartof: Teaching and Teacher Education vol:44 pages:117-127 status: published

This article reports on a narrative analysis of one teacher educator’s learning journey in a two-year professional development project. Professional development is conceived of as the complex learning processes resulting from the meaningful interactions between the individual teacher educator and his/her working context. Our analysis indicates that the capacity to manage such interactions contributes strongly to teacher educators’ experience of vulnerability. We analytically describe three strategies (building positive selfesteem, sustaining moral commitment and purpose, and strategical compliance) to cope with this vulnerability and their impact on processes of professional development as well as the outcomes of it. Understanding the role of the working context – and vulnerability as a structural characteristic of that context – in professional development processes adds to existing knowledge of teacher educators’ professional lives and development. ispartof: European Journal of Teacher Education vol:39 issue:3 pages:355-367 status: published

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 selfstudy 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. ispartof: Professional Development in Education vol:42 issue:1 pages:100-122 status: published

This chapter is contributed by InFo-TED, the International Forum for Teacher Educator Development. This newly established community brings together people from across the world to exchange research, policy, and practice related to teacher educators’ professional learning and development. We define teacher educators broadly as those who are professionally involved and engaged in the initial and on-going education of teachers. Our contention is that while there is general agreement about the important role played by teacher educators, their professional education is under-studied and under-supported. Here, we elaborate the rationale for this initiative, delineate our conceptual framework, and provide examples of steps taken in Belgium, Ireland, and Norway to develop the professional identities and knowledge bases of those who educate and support teachers, and conclude with implications for a implications for a scholarly study agenda having to do with research, policy, and practice relating to teacher educators’ professional development.

This article reports on a systematic review of the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices research literature published between 1990 and 2012. Self-study research refers to teacher educators researching their practice with the purpose of improving it, making explicit and validating their professional expertise and, at the same time, contributing to the knowledge base of teacher education. Reflecting our analysis, we defined self-study as a research approach in the field of teacher education which can be typified by the following characteristics: self-study research focuses on one’s own practice; for this reason, it privileges the use of qualitative research methods; collaborative interactions play a central role in the research process; and its validation is based on trustworthiness. Furthermore, we identified two tensions inherent in the self-study work, on which researchers always and continuously need to position themselves for self-study inquiries to achieve its purposes: the tension between relevance and rigour on the one hand, and that of effectiveness and understanding on the other hand. ispartof: Journal of Curriculum Studies vol:47 issue:4 pages:508-528 status: published

In this article we elaborate a case where citizens were encouraged to discuss an environmental policy plan within seven focus groups. In line with this experience, we raise two questions about the deliberation process we tried to support. First, how to understand the importance of narratives as sources of civic learning? Second, how can a narrative understanding of civic education challenge current practices of citizen participation? Our answers to these questions are grounded both in the practical context of the seven focus groups and in a more theoretical endeavour to understand policy planning as a particular educational practice for citizens.