Chapter 14: Intentional Teacher Education: The Education of Scholarly Practitioners

Most of us who are currently faculty members in teacher education programs can remember our first heady days of graduate school—the excitement of meeting new colleagues, the anticipation of all that we might learn from the professors and experiences in which we were about to engage, and the nervousness of whether we were capable of the work required to complete our programs of study. As our current positions illustrate, we generally had successful experiences in graduate school, leading us into professional work and commitments to teacher education. Yet as we reflect on this time and our ongoing work with graduate students who are also entering teacher education in some capacity, we ponder the design and possible redesigns for teacher educator education. As graduate students, many of us took positions as teaching assistants, while others among us took graduate assistantship positions that required us to supervise undergraduate students in their field placements. Here we had to quickly learn to negotiate the demands of public school systems, universities, and various regulatory bodies like state departments of education. We had to sit in public school classrooms to observe new teachers negotiate their role transformation from student to beginning teacher. We learned to understand the constraints they faced because of their placements, the expectations and demonstrations their mentor teachers offered, and how to prioritize the areas in which they needed to grow as teachers. We hoped to strike a balance between being supportive and offering constructive advice about how they could improve, and we learned the importance of conveying thoughtfully these sentiments orally and in writing.