ABSTRACT
The Netherlands provides a particularly interesting context for examining teacher preparation for several key reasons. First, students in the Netherlands perform quite well academically in comparison to their peers in Europe and in the United States. Second, the Netherlands faces a series of challenges shared by other countries, in particular, regarding teacher quality and recruitment. Finally, teacher preparation in the Netherlands is somewhat unique, in that the faculty at some of the best-known and most highly regarded universities share a common vision for—and approach to—teacher preparation. While the Netherlands is a small country (employing roughly 135,000 primary teachers, and 75,000 secondary teachers in 2006) taken together, these features suggest the importance of better understanding the nature of Dutch teacher preparation. In order to set the stage for this case, we first provide an overview of the educational context.
