ABSTRACT
By now it may have become clear that the realistic approach to teacher education requires specific knowledge and skills in the teacher educators. That is why we cannot ignore the question of how teacher educators can learn to use the principles outlined in this book. This means that we go from the level of student teachers’ learning to teach, to the level of teacher educators’ learning to teach teachers. This may seem a remarkable step, because in the literature on teacher education there are almost no references to the need for professional development of teacher education staff. In the next section (13.2), we will dive into this issue of the professional development of teacher educators from a broad, international perspective. In section 13.3, we will focus on the situation in our own teacher education program at the IVLOS Institute of Education at Utrecht University. There we were very much confronted with the need for professional development of the IVLOS staff when the realistic approach started to take shape. We will describe this situation and the consequences that we observed (e.g., the need for a training course for cooperative teachers and teacher educators). Soon after, we started to offer such a course to
teacher educators from other institutes. In section 13.4, a closer look at the aims, structure, and content of these training courses is presented. In 13.5, several parts of the courses will be illustrated with real-life examples from exercises, whereupon we will also highlight several pedagogical principles strongly influencing the course approach (in section 13.6). Finally, it is our turn to reflect on our experiences with giving the course, and we will make recommendations for the professional development of teacher educators (section 13.7).
