Chapter 14: Forging Evidence-Based Inquiry and Teaching in Teacher Education

The Teacher Leader Model Standards by the Teacher Leadership Exploratory Consortium (TLEC, 2011), together form a theoretical model to guide the preparation of effective teacher leaders for the needs of the 21st century student. They acknowledge the need for preparing teachers who can model and apply systematic inquiry as an essential element of their ongoing learning and professional development. This is important in all disciplines, including early childhood special education programs. Unfortunately, in light of the most recent report on educational research by Knight et al. (2012), derogative epithets such as “flawed,” “lacking rigor and relevance,” “missing conclusive evidence,” or “less advanced than the mainstream research” (p. 5) are often leveled at educational research in general and research on teaching in particular. Within this identity crisis in teacher educational research, the call for preparing teacher practitioners who are skilled both in evidence-based teaching and evidence-based inquiry takes on a new urgency (Knight et al., 2012; Roblin & Margalef, 2013). In this chapter, we focus on modern educational research, advocate various models of teacher education research that can promote rigorous and systematic evidence-based inquiry in teacher education, and present suggestions from multiple disciplines on how to prepare a new generation of teacher educational researchers.