Teacher educator professional inquiry in an age of accountability

‘Teacher educators’ are teachers of teachers and may typically be based within schools or within university departments. In this chapter we argue that all teacher educators should adopt ‘inquiry as stance’ and should be actively engaged in ongoing professional inquiry or practitioner research. Within a team delivering initial teacher education programmes we argue that there needs to be a range of expertise but with all teacher educators active in professional inquiry. We define professional inquiry as distinct from pragmatic evaluation which is everyday quality assurance procedures. Beyond that we propose that at least some members of a teacher educator team should be engaged in ongoing classroom practice whilst others need to be engaged in practitioner research. The content of teacher education programmes needs to include critical engagement with cutting edge research evidence and with learning theory as well as enactment, experimentation and evaluation of core practices in classrooms. Teacher education, both initial and advanced, needs to equip teachers with the essential skills and knowledge of educational research literacy so that they have the professional tools required to contribute to curriculum development and develop research-informed practice. Teacher educators based in schools and universities need to model professional inquiry and practitioner research.