International Portal of Teacher Education
The online resource of academic content on teacher training and teacher education
Search results for: MacPhail Ann
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9 items
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This study describes higher education-based teacher educators’ professional trajectories, i.e. their professional activities and learning as developed throughout their career.
Semi-structured interviews were held with 41 teacher educators from Ireland, Israel, Norway and the Netherlands.
Findings show that teacher educators were recruited mainly from schools and universities.
As novices, they received some, but no formal, support.
Research and teaching are the main areas for on-the-job learning.
Most teacher educators have positive attitudes towards research, are active researchers and contribute to teaching.
However, they believe their respective institutes are not sufficiently appreciative of teaching, given that institutes do not prioritise practice-oriented research, nor align their policies with research findings.
While socially coherent and idealistic attitudes are present among teacher educators, they are predominantly responsive to institutes’ perceived individualistic and pragmatic expectations.
Such expectations include contribution to their institutes’ academic status through their academic publications.
Published: 2021
Updated: Dec. 08, 2021
2
The purpose of this study is to describe the professional development needs and activities of 61 teacher educators across six national jurisdictions (England, Ireland, Israel, Norway, Scotland and The Netherlands) and to reveal influencing factors and affordances conducive to professional development.
Semi-structured interviews constituted questions on professional learning opportunities and teacher education and research. Results from the interviews convey themes around the areas of
(i) self-initiated professional development,
(ii) the importance of experiencing professional development through collaboration with peers and colleagues,
(iii) accessing opportunities to improve teacher education teaching practices, and
(iv) the inextricable link between teaching and research and, consequently, the need to upskill in research skills.
Discussion points that arise include the induction period, frustration and tension in navigation, haphazard professional learning and learning with, and from, each other.
Published: 2019
Updated: Jul. 28, 2020
3
If teacher education is to be taken seriously, it must be research-based with teacher educators as active researchers and perceived as ‘public intellectuals’.
This re-positioning of teacher education to be ‘research driven’ comes with pressure on teacher educators to focus on securing research funding and increase publication output.
This expectation for research productivity competes with increasing calls for more relevant and imaginative teacher preparation programmes.
To present the challenging contexts in which Irish teacher educators operate with respect to fulfilling both a teaching and research remit, this paper maps the changing higher education landscape, the regulation of teacher education along with a myriad of curricular reforms at primary and post-primary level.
The paper then explores current teacher educators’ positioning in the Irish context as active users and producers of research through in-depth interviews with ten experienced teacher educators.
Published: 2019
Updated: Apr. 23, 2020
4
As a teacher educator, the author shares her experiences and positioning as an apprentice, academic and administrator. While she refers to each as a ‘phase’, she suggests each overlap at varying times throughout teacher educators' careers/life, particularly if they are lifelong learners and that an element of apprenticeship is present in all that they strive to do, although not everyone perhaps acknowledges and engages with apprenticeship as professional learning and learning about oneself.
Published: 2017
Updated: Jul. 10, 2017
5
The purpose of this international and comparative study is to examine what professional learning activities teacher educators value and what factors affect their participation in these activities. The findings reveal that two types of teacher educators’ professional learning needs arise from the data: (i) those involving the development of educational capacities related to their day-to-day remit as a teacher educator and (ii) those required for progressing an academic career, with research and writing skills being the most salient. Furthermore, this study emphasises the ways in which teacher educators, as both teachers and researchers, want to be part of a collaborative community where they can feel supported, listened to, and share their practices and experiences.
Published: 2016
Updated: Jun. 21, 2017
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The purpose of this article is to review research carried out on, with and by physical education (PE) teacher educators over the last 25 years. It also aims to identify areas where research is lacking, in order to provide scholars with a useful context for the design and conduct of future scholarly inquiry on PE teacher educators. The authors found that the bias of English language publications notwithstanding, there has certainly been a much stronger focus on PE teacher educator research in the US than elsewhere. While a wealth of data has been collected on US PE teacher educators, a number of themes have received little attention elsewhere, such as the demographic make-up, biographies, careers, socialisation, or work roles of PE teacher educators beyond North America.
Published: 2015
Updated: Jun. 19, 2017
7
This article examines the professional development (PD) of a group of urban physical education teachers as they moved from a learning community focused on a new curriculum in physical education to a community of practice (CoP) committed to intense, sustained and focused engagement on issues related to their teaching practice and personal growth as physical educators. The participants reported development of their teaching practice and pedagogical skills by applying the teaching strategies shared by colleagues in the community. The teachers came to recognise their ability to design lessons to engage students and to implement these lessons in ways that were challenging and exciting, supporting the notion of increased self-efficacy. Their focus was consistently on their students and how to impact their learning by developing their own knowledge and skills in order to provide a quality education.
Published: 2017
Updated: Jun. 14, 2017
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This article investigates how and what type of relationships cooperating teachers (CTs) can develop with student teachers (STs) and university tutors (UTs) to enhance the school placement process. By facilitating collaborative relationships, a CT’s learning experience can be positively enhanced and a ST is provided with a scaffolded entry into the teaching profession. As the relationships in the study had various degrees of mutual engagement, joint enterprise and a shared repertoire, it allowed the ongoing interactions between various stakeholders to be labelled ‘communities’. The approaches of the CTs in developing communities were either enabled or challenged by other members in the school placement process.
Published: 2016
Updated: Jun. 13, 2017
9
The purpose of this study was to explore the extent to which the constructivist pedagogies employed by teacher educators assisted preservice teachers (PSTs) in their understanding and construction of knowledge about instructional alignment. The findings revealed that PSTs varied in their articulation of the various elements of instructional alignment that were captured in the rich task. Furthermore, the results showed that through peer interaction in the form of discussion with critical friends, probing and challenging one another’s insights and interpretations, group problem solving and sharing of outcomes through various pedagogical strategies.
Published: 2013
Updated: Nov. 01, 2016