Chapter 4: Preparing The Teacher Educator: Negotiating the Tensions of Teacher Educator Preparation Within the Research Institution

This comment still resonates with Annie years later, and it rings true for the rest of the authors as well. Working in the field of teacher education, we often encounter those who view teacher education as a “self-evident activity” (Hollins, Luna, & Lopez, 2014, p. 118). To label teacher education as a self-evident activity assumes that the practice of teaching teachers can be done naturally, without careful study or intent. Essentially, this perspective is an extension of Lortie’s (1975) description of the apprenticeship of observation which is a term used in teacher training to describe teachers who teach the way they have been taught. Teacher education as a self-evident activity supposes that preparing teachers of teachers is unnecessary or that someone who was a strong K‒12 teacher will naturally be a strong teacher educator.