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The Importance Of A Teacher Educator

Decent Essays

Teacher Educators
I began my quest with the goal to examine how I can better prepare pre-service by asking, what is a good teacher educator? What knowledge, skills, or competencies should a teacher educator possess? Little is known about the professional quality of teacher educators (Koster, Brekelmans, Korthagen, & Wubbels, 2005; Zeichner, 1999). It is problematic that many assume that an effective teacher will make a good teacher educator (Korthagen, Loughran, & Lunenberg, 2005) or conversely, that an effective teacher educator will make a good teacher (Ritter, 2014). These views suggest that teacher educators are neither particularly specialized nor highly valued (Korthagen et al., 2005). As noted in Chapter 1, these assumptions are inconsistent with the growing body of research describing the expertise required for teacher educators (Korthagen et al., 2005; Koster et al., 2005; Loughran & Russell, 2007; Murray & Male, 2005). Additionally, when viewed through a constructivist lens, the importance of the teacher educator is heightened when one acknowledges that the teacher educator facilitates the students’ development of their own knowledge and skills (Korthagen et al., 2005).
Shulman (1986) also highlights the importance of the teacher educator. University instructors often are content specialists while in schools of education an instructor may be viewed as a pedagogical specialist. Shulman argues that for a teacher “content knowledge is likely to be as useless as a

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