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This chapter is contributed by InFo-TED, the International Forum for Teacher Educator Development. This newly established community brings together people from across the world to exchange research, policy, and practice related to teacher educators' professional learning and development. We define teacher educators broadly as those who are professionally involved and engaged in the initial and ongoing education of teachers. Our contention is that while there is general agreement about the important role played by teacher educators, their professional education is understudied and undersupported. Here, we elaborate the rationale for this initiative, delineate our conceptual framework, and provide examples of steps taken in Belgium, Ireland, and Norway to develop the professional identities and knowledge bases of those who educate and support teachers, and conclude with implications for a scholarly study agenda having to do with research, policy, and practice relating to teacher educators' professional development.

This chapter is contributed by InFo-TED, the International Forum for Teacher Educator Development. This newly established community brings together people from across the world to exchange research, policy, and practice related to teacher educators’ professional learning and development. We define teacher educators broadly as those who are professionally involved and engaged in the initial and on-going education of teachers. Our contention is that while there is general agreement about the important role played by teacher educators, their professional education is under-studied and under-supported. Here, we elaborate the rationale for this initiative, delineate our conceptual framework, and provide examples of steps taken in Belgium, Ireland, and Norway to develop the professional identities and knowledge bases of those who educate and support teachers, and conclude with implications for a implications for a scholarly study agenda having to do with research, policy, and practice relating to teacher educators’ professional development.

In this chapter, we present Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP) as a research methodology that can be used pedagogically to explore the practices of teacher educators for their professional development. It can be seen as a pedagogic practice that enlists reflection to enable teacher educators to explore and explicate practice and make explicit what they know about teaching and teacher education in order to improve practice and contribute to larger conversations in research on teaching and teacher education. After providing a succinct interpretation of the origins of S-STEP work, we suggest that historical context, along with the understanding of the theoretical underpinnings, makes it viable as a research methodology and a potentially valuable pedagogy for teacher education research. S-STEP is an intimate research methodology (Hamilton, 1995) in which the person conducting the research is both the focus and the author of the research and provides an insider’s perspective into practice and experience.

We provide examples to demonstrate how others and we take up S-STEP as pedagogy for teacher educator professional development that allows us to grapple with what we know either explicitly or tacitly from and about our practice. International S-STEP research has the power to inform the professional development of teacher educators across these boundaries, because it attends carefully to the particular of the practice and context from which it emerged.

This chapter traces the development of InFo-TED, the International Forum for Teacher Educators' Development, which originated with four European teacher educators in 2013. Given that the role of teacher educators is largely missing in the description of the enactment of teacher education, this work focused attention solely on teacher educators and their professional development, as well on how its membership kept InFo-TED growing and expanding internationally. Two contrasting narratives of teacher educator are included to show the diversity in their preparation and roles. The chapter ends with generic features of teacher educators' work and a discussion of what factors are more nationally, institutionally, and not to be overlooked, personally dependent. Erasmus funding and dissemination were discussed, all with the intent of understanding how to act locally, but impact globally.

The MOFET Institution, which began under the auspices of the Ministry of Education, is Israel’s national center for research and professional development on teacher education. It consists of three communities: (1) the Writing Channel; (2) the Study Channel; and (3) the Research Channel. MOFET additionally has an Academic Committee that assists the aforementioned communities in their deliberations if needed. Although the MOFET Institute deals with multiple and sometimes conflicting agendas (i.e., Ministry of Education, participating teacher education colleges, the institute’s own goals), it remains one of the most unique and powerful ways to nationally address teacher education research and dissemination and the development of teacher educators in the world.

At the heart of educational work is the teacher; and, everybody in the society from parents to the federal government, school administrators, industry, policy-makers, teacher educators, and not-for-profit organizations carry certain notions about the practice of teaching and work of teachers. Each constituency desires to have able, committed, and qualified teachers to care for the young ones of their society. Developing quality teachers is intricately linked to the quality of teacher education. Teacher educator professionalism is central to the improvement of teacher education and therefore school learning, and needs greater emphasis in the context of India. This chapter begins by outlining the work of teacher educators in higher education-based initial teacher preparation programs. It then gives a brief overview of the changes in initial teacher education in the early twenty-first century. This chapter further analyses the various dimensions of teacher educators’ quality of practice as framed by educational documents to gather insights about their practice among the diverse contexts in India. This chapter makes a plea to teacher educators in India to come together as a collective and take responsibility for strengthening quality teaching in India. This chapter concludes with a proposal for a framework of professional practice of teacher educators.

This chapter examines the professional background, trajectories, and learning of a broad group of teacher educators involved in initial teacher education. The work specifically identifies those who shape the practice of teaching. The authors who are members of the International Forum on Teacher Educator Development (InFo-TED) were key to the creation of InFo-TED, NA (North America), which has used Zoom technology to launch and spread its efforts. Its central purpose is to spur teacher educators and policymakers to embrace new ways to educate all children.

This paper aims to postulate an emerging unified cultural‐convergence framework to converge the delivery of instructional technology and intercultural education (ICE) that extends beyond web‐learning technologies to inculcate inclusive pedagogy in teacher education.

The paper explores the literature and a tech‐infused multicultural learning community to identify what a unified cultural‐convergence theory might consist of and how it could be shaped to align instructional technology and critical ICE in teacher education. Four questions are asked: What key learning do these two disciplines make available to teachers and educators that are essential for today's highly diverse, complex classrooms? What can we draw from a convergence of multiculturalism and global education that will help us derive a new theoretical understanding of a unified cultural‐convergence theory to connect IT and ICE education? What knowledge, skills and dispositions comprise three essential components of this literature synthesis? How can this new unified cultural‐convergence theory and relevant components be taught, practiced, and measured? The paper contains several tables, figures and over 50 sources in the research bibliography that were selected from a review and analysis of 100 documents.

The paper discovered instructional technology and intercultural educators employed web‐learning technologies in very similar ways to position critical ICE strategies into programs or courses in teacher education. The learning technologies models that were attempting to support multicultural education (MCE)/ICE and IT education included corporate, universities, research centers, schools, and government partners. Reportedly, according to the research, teacher educators in IT education do not employ instructional technology practices that differ from practices that are needed or valued by MCE educators to merge critical intercultural structures into teacher education through web‐learning technologies. This was good news as the researcher moves toward a recommendation for a research agenda that could be shared by educators from the two groups.

The paper is limited to literature reviews, reports, and evaluation documents.

The paper offers implications for curriculum development in educational technology and MCE using ICTs

Situated within the recent scholarship on core practices in teacher education, this chapter presents a collaborative self-study that explored one aspect of our developing practice as teacher educators through examination of Francis’s use of mediation in lesson rehearsal. Using examples from his practice, we explore the following research question: How does a teacher educator learn to provide mediation to create a responsive zone of proximal development within lesson rehearsal?

Specifically, we use Vygotskian sociocultural theory to examine Francis’s use of mediation during the rehearsal of the core practice supporting interaction and target language comprehensibility (I-TLC), one of the core practices addressed in his world language teacher preparation program. This self-study of mediation in lesson rehearsal illuminated Francis’ evolving practice as a facilitator of lesson rehearsal of novice teachers who are culturally and linguistically diverse, and who are preparing to use practices that are responsive to culturally and linguistically diverse students.