Design principles for the professional development of teacher educators: Illustrations of narration, dialogue and self-study

Teacher education has been recognized increasingly as a profession that fundamentally differs from teaching pupils in schools. This has resulted in teacher educator development programs which address the uniqueness of the profession. In this article we depart from this recognition of teacher education as a profession outlining the specifics of teacher education, and we describe a professional development program for teacher educators run in the Netherlands. We describe its building blocks and three design principles – narrative inquiry, dialogue and self-study – and illustrate their value by examples of evaluations taken from the program.