3 Review(s)

Good teacher education, informed by relevant research, is judged by policy makers and practitioners alike to be central to increasing the quality of schooling in many countries of the world. Yet, in the UK, research on teacher education is often acknowledged to be less well developed than other areas of educational research and to be over-determined by education policy. It has also been accused of a lack of rigour and of being atheoretical. A further challenge in developing good research in teacher education is that new teacher educators commonly face the challenge of moving into academic work without relevant research skills and the ready capacity to produce high quality research outputs. For these reasons, then, strengthening research in and on teacher education is high on educational agendas in the UK. This book examines the exact nature of these challenges in teacher education and the initiatives arising to address them in different settings across the four nations of the UK. The central theme of all the chapters is how to build ‘research capacity’ so that teacher education can contribute more strongly to the improvement of schooling, as well as becoming a high quality, research-informed enterprise in its own right. The insights will be valuable to teacher educators around the world. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Education and Teaching. Table of Contents 1. Introduction: Capacity building in teacher education research 2. A critical history of research assessment in the United Kingdom and its post-1992 impact on education 3. Research capacity building in teacher education: Scottish collaborative approaches 4. Harnessing the slipstream: building educational research capacity in Northern Ireland. Size matters 5. How engagement with research changes the professional practice of teacher-educators: a case study from the Welsh Education Research Network 6. Capacity = expertise × motivation × opportunities: factors in capacity building in teacher education in England 7. Building capacity through teacher enquiry: the Scottish Schools of Ambition 8. Scallops, schools and scholars: reflections on the emergence of a research-oriented learning project 9. The TEG bibliography: having knowledge and using it – next steps?