Designing professional development for teacher educators: Creating long-term learning for the workplace

Long-term learning with clear relevance to practice and the workplace is a valued goal for those who design professional development opportunities for teacher educators. Such opportunities may take many forms, occurring both in and away from the workplace and resulting in both short- and long-term learning. Some one-off events may be valuable in promoting learning of both types. One question in designing professional development is then: how might short-term learning away from the workplace become a meaningful part of longer-term learning in it?

Drawing on qualitative data from a one-off learning event – the Summer Academy within the InFo-TED project – the research questions here are about the short- and long-term learning which occurred for the participating teacher educators during the Academy, and the structures which may have facilitated such learning. The chapter then looks at the wider implications of this small-scale study for designing professional learning opportunities with high relevance for practice. It concludes that teacher educators themselves must be the drivers of their own learning trajectories and the key change agents within their professional workplaces.