Quality Teacher Education Research

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB, 2002), introduced nearly 10 years ago, called for scientifically based and evidence-based practices. This 2001 legislation has led to subsequent changes in federal funding policies that encourage the use of a more quantitative approach to measuring cause-and-effect relationships between educational conditions and outcomes to produce generalized findings that can inform policy decision making (Feuer, Towne, & Shavelson, 2002). Consequently, these government policies have spawned debates over what constitutes quality educational research and what direction the development of future educational research should take. (1) In this editorial, we examine the questions of What is quality research? and How can we judge it? by referencing research in teaching and education. We review briefly the landscape and characteristics of research in education. Then, using the National Research Council's (NRC; 2002) guidelines as a framework, we offer ideas about what constitutes quality research in education. Lastly, drawing on our experience reviewing 702 manuscripts submitted to the Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) during our inaugural year as editors, we discuss some of the standards that we believe are important for judging the quality of research in education. In doing this, we hope to stimulate discussions about how reviewers and editors evaluate research and how the reporting of research in education can be improved. Traditions of Research in Teaching and Teacher Education During the short history of educational research, two competing approaches to inquiry into teaching and education have emerged. Each importantly, yet differently, shapes the identity of educators as researchers and their relationships with the outside world. During the 1960s and 1970s, teaching and education research methods were heavily influenced and shaped by behavioral and social measurement in psychology (Zeichner, 1999). Much of the education research on process-product and teacher effectiveness in the 1980s likewise derived from behavioral psychology in that it focused on how the behavior of teachers affected student performance and learning (Beattie, 1995; McDonald & Elias, 1976). These earlier research studies commonly assumed that causality was linear and unidirectional: the behavior of the affected the behavior of students, which in turn affected student achievement (e.g., Doyle, 1977; Dunkin & Biddle, 1974; Shulman, 1986; Zeichner, 1999). As the field evolved, the unidirectional conception of causality from behavior to observed student behavior was modified to a bi-directional relationship (Brophy & Good, 1986). Nevertheless, the research designs that dominated this era were primarily quantitative and focused on establishing and testing theoretical assumptions about behavior that could be generalized to various contexts of teaching. Research on how education influenced learning received relatively little attention prior to the 1990s (Zeichner, 1999). The behavioral approach that guided research on teaching and education ultimately had several important effects on research-active educators' identity in academia and their political relationships outside of academe. First, it aligned educators with scientists in academia where the status, prestige, and rewards of its members are determined by how hard the knowledge is that they produce (Labaree, 1998). Second, it pushed educators to be professionals, like those in medicine, who produced and used specialized, shared knowledge that consumers of education relied on to make judgments about the quality of services they received (Sykes & Bird, 1992). Third, it positioned educators closer to the powerful policy world in supplying reliable and verifiable information for furthering policy makers' agendas (Cochran-Smith, 2001; Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2005). …

School Reform: The District Policy Implications of the Effective Schools Literature

The theme of accountability currently permeates conversations about education at every level, including teacher education and professional development. In our Call for Manuscripts for this theme issue, we invited empirical or conceptual manuscripts addressing assessment and accountability in teacher education that would move the community forward in considering the topics both more precisely and with greater complexity. The range of suggested subtopics and questions within assessment and accountability in teacher education was broad to elicit a wide range of responses. In general, we asked, Who is to be held accountable? For what? And by whom? As we reviewed the many excellent submissions, one predominant response to these questions centered on value-added modeling (VAM) approaches to accountability. Although this is only one of several answers to the questions we asked, it is one that has important intended and unintended consequences for various stakeholders in teacher education, including beginning teachers, mentor teachers, administrators, teacher educators, higher education institutions, and policy makers. Emergence of Value-Added Models for Teacher Education The rise of interest in VAM for teacher education is related to the search for the definition of teacher quality that has emerged as a primary factor in determination of K-12 student performance, probably as a confluence of a number of events (see Knight, 2011). The Tennessee study (Sanders & Horn, 1998), a landmark study using random assignment of teachers and students to classrooms, firmly established the advantage for students of having a high-quality teacher over a number of years. For many years, educators had struggled with the seemingly intractable socioeconomic factors related to poor student performance. The notion of teacher quality appeared to be manipulable and constituted a viable approach for closing student achievement gaps. Not only do teachers make a difference but their effectiveness can potentially be assessed, rewarded, and improved through recruitment, incentives, and/or professional development. No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top funding and legislation served to popularize the VAM approach for determination of teacher quality. Given the emphasis on teacher professional development as a contributor to teacher quality, the application of VAM approaches for teacher education accountability may have appeared to be an obvious connection to policy makers (see Floden, 2012 [this issue]). Despite the rather limited evidence of the impacts of teacher preparation programs on student achievement (Duckworth, Quinn, & Seligman, 2009), many policy makers concluded that the quality of teacher education preparation, as with individual teachers, can potentially be assessed, rewarded, and improved--or removed if necessary. However, just as VAM applied to determination of individual teacher quality resulted in a number of methodological, ethical, and other concerns, VAM used to determine the quality of teacher education programs carries similar concerns as well as others specific to teacher education. Possibilities and Limitations of VAM for Teacher Education In February 2012, Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) sponsored a Major Forum at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) Annual Meeting in Chicago that featured research using VAM for assessment of the quality of teacher education programs in several states and commentaries that focused participants on both the possibilities as well as the limitations of this approach. Participants agreed that the framing of VAM as a policy issue is important and that much is at stake as we consider the education of teachers and the education of young people in this country. Federal and state governments are investing a great deal of money in value-added assessment systems, and the consequences of policy implementation are complex and significant. …

Previous articleNext article No AccessChanging Values Challenge the SchoolsJ. W. GetzelsJ. W. Getzels Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 65, Number 1Spring, 1957 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/442379 Views: 5Total views on this site Citations: 10Citations are reported from Crossref Journal History This article was published in The School Review (1893-1979), which is continued by the American Journal of Education (1979-present). Copyright 1957 University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Rosemarie McCartin, Maurice Freehill Values of Early Adolescents Compared by Type of School, The Journal of Early Adolescence 6, no.44 (Sep 2016): 369–380.https://doi.org/10.1177/0272431686064007Anwar Faily Effective Administrative Behavior, NASSP Bulletin 64, no.433433 (Jul 2016): 30–36.https://doi.org/10.1177/019263658006443307Ruth S. Jones Teachers as Agents of Political Socialization, Education and Urban Society 4, no.11 (Jul 2016): 99–114.https://doi.org/10.1177/001312457100400109Mary Wannamaker, W. Wesley Tennyson The Value Orientation of Beginning Elementary Teacher Education Students, Journal of Teacher Education 21, no.44 (Dec 1970): 544–550.https://doi.org/10.1177/002248717002100416GEORGE E. SLINGER Values and the Counseling Relationship in the High School, Vocational Guidance Quarterly 15, no.11 (Dec 2011): 11–17.https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2164-585X.1966.tb01149.xRobert J. Nejedlo, Gail F. Farwell Value Orientations and School Counselor Role Expectations, Counselor Education and Supervision 5, no.22 (Feb 2012): 61–67.https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-6978.1966.tb02169.xLuvern L. Cunningham Perspectives on the Policy Role for Professionals in Education, SPATE: Journal of Student Personnel Association for Teacher Education 4, no.33 (Dec 2011): 69–80.https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2164-6171.1965.tb00101.xJohn G. Chaltas Student Teaching: Assignment and Misassignment, Journal of Teacher Education 16, no.33 (Jul 2016): 311–318.https://doi.org/10.1177/002248716501600313Kenneth H. Hoover An Instructional Approach to the Development of an Emergent Value Orientation, Journal of Teacher Education 14, no.44 (Jul 2016): 402–405.https://doi.org/10.1177/002248716301400409 Charles E. Bidwell , Stanley H. King , Bruce Finnie , and Harry A. Scarr Undergraduate Careers: Alternatives and Determinants, The School Review 71, no.33 (Oct 2015): 299–316.https://doi.org/10.1086/442668

Educators, scholars, and policy makers agree that quality research is needed to improve teaching and teacher education (Boote & Beile, 2005; Grossman, 2008; Levine, 2007; Young, 2008). This is especially true in the current climate of increasing pressures to produce research that can guide policy making in an age of standards-based reform and teacher accountability. As pressures to enhance student achievement and teaching practice mount, so too does the demand for better and more rigorous empirical educational research that can inform policies and practice. Critical to this improvement is the preparation and training of educational researchers in doctoral programs. It is often presumed that teacher educators who have completed doctoral programs possess the knowledge and skills to conduct research that can contribute to the knowledge base of teaching and teacher education. It is also expected that the academic work produced by these teacher educators be useful in informing teaching practice, teacher education, and policies. However, much has been written about the lack of rigor and weaknesses in work produced by educational researchers in general and teacher educators in particular. Questions about the value of some contributions to the collective knowledge about teaching and teacher education have been raised (Grossman, 2004, 2008; Lagemann, 2000; Levine, 2007; Lin, Wang, Klecka, Odell, & Spalding, 2010; Mitchell & Haro, 1999; Wilson, 2006; Wilson & Tamir, 2008; Zeichner, 2005). Differences in traditions, purposes, design, and foci among different doctoral programs engendered, in part, by the lack of consensus about standards of good research and complicated by the multiple disciplinary traditions within the field of educational research (Levine, 2007; Metz, 2001) as well as the lack of distinction between PhD and EdD degrees (Shulman, Golde, Bueschel, & Garabedian, 2006) have not helped matters. Although recently some discourse has occurred around improving the preparation of educational researchers in doctoral programs (Labaree, 2003; Levine, 2007; Neumann, Pallas, & Peterson, 2008; Pallas, 2001, Schoenfeld, 1999; Wilson, 2006; Young, 2001; Zeichner, 2005), research about teacher educators and their research preparation in doctoral programs is understudied and in its infancy. (1) Much is still unknown about the links between teacher education programs and subsequent teacher performance and student achievement. A similar gap exists between researcher preparation and the subsequent quality of educational researchers. There is much to be learned about how best to prepare teacher educators in the midst of enduring charges of low-quality research and increasing demands for research that can inform policy and practice. The principal aim of this editorial is to provoke thought and dialogue about how to prepare better teacher educator-researchers in research-focused doctoral programs and propose possible research areas that may be useful to strengthening or rethinking their preparation. Although we recognize that being prepared to be a good teacher educator-researcher in academe encompasses more than simply being prepared to conduct high-quality educational research, such as learning to be a strong teacher and mentor (Chauvot, 2009), we focus our discussion on the research preparation component in doctoral programs to stimulate deeper thought about better practices for preparing and training teacher educator-researchers. We frame our discussion around three questions: What should be learned about research? How should candidates learn to do research? How can learning about and doing research be sustained beyond doctoral programs? What Should Be Learned About Research? Learning about research encompasses many aspects. It is expected generally that in doctoral programs, aspiring educational researchers learn to understand the complexity of research issues from multiple disciplinary traditions of theory and method and situate their work so that it contributes to the collective understanding of the field (Boote & Beile, 2005; Metz, 2001; Golde, 2007; Shulman, 2003; Towne, Wise & Winters, 2005). …

Equipping teachers for the full range of diversity of students in today's schools has long been a shared concern among teacher educators. Bilingual education, special education, culturally responsive teaching, social justice education, and urban education are among the several responses to this fundamental educational goal. These responses, however, although critical for moving the project of educational equity forward, have tended to produce conversations within diversity communities in teacher education rather than across them. The aim of this special issue is to open up what we believe to be a long overdue conversation among scholars from different diversity communities within teacher education to begin to think about what is needed if we are to advance teacher education that is responsive to the full range of diversity of students and that takes account of the multiple markers of identity that characterize individuals and groups of students--disability among them. This special issue grew out of a major session that took place at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) titled Diversity Frameworks in Teacher Education: Where Does Special Education Belong? The purpose of that session was to initiate a dialogue among teacher education leaders in multicultural education, culturally responsive teaching, social justice education, and special education to begin to unravel the enduring and thorny problem of why, given the longstanding rhetoric of preparing teachers for diversity, there has been comparatively little discussion about the role of special education within the larger discourse of diversity of race, class, culture, and language. The roots of that session can be traced back to discussions that began in 2002, during a 5-year joint, federally funded project housed within the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) in the Council of Chief State School Officers, with AACTE as one of the lead partners. In response to the call for special education teachers to become highly qualified under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), teams participating in this project, representing 45 states and made up of higher education faculty in general and special education and their respective counterparts at the state level, started to grapple with the question of what it meant to prepare novice teachers for in this new policy context. Team members began to raise important issues about preparing general education teachers for students with disabilities as an integral part of teacher education reform. With this special issue of Journal of Teacher Education (JTE), we broaden this question for the teacher education community: How can we work together to advance a more complete vision of diversity, one that does not merely attach disability to a long list of social markers of identity, but rather works from the assumption-and indeed the fact--that the children and youth for whom we prepare teachers do not have just one diversity identity, but rather multiple diversity identities that interact with and nest within one another in different and often complex ways. We appreciate the willingness of the scholars whose work appears in this issue--Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Curt Dudley-Marling, Jacqueline Jordan Irvine, Robert Rueda and Jamy Stillman, and Ana Maria Villegas--to join us in a rich conversation that pushes at the outer margins of the many diversity communities in which their and our work is typically situated. …

Teacher education reform in the United States (US) is a crucial part of a broader educational reform intended to improve teaching practice and, thus, student performance (Darling-Hammond, 2005). Teacher education reform has become an international trend (Bates, 2008; Garm & Karlsen, 2004), which in spite of the different national contexts and traditions, shares a set of similar expectations, foci, and even policy interventions (Loomis, Rodriguez, & Tillman, 2008). Underlying these reforms are the assumptions that the quality of teaching is the most important, if not the only, factor that contributes to changes in student learning, which is shaped by factors such as teacher salaries, working conditions, and public support for public schools (Education Policy White Paper Project, 2009). Teacher education is a major factor in improving teaching quality (Delandshere & Petrosky, 2004). Central to the quality of teaching are teachers' deep understanding of what they need to teach and the pedagogical practices that can be used to represent such understanding to students (D. L. Ball, 2000). These have become important foci for reform in teacher education programs in many countries. Policy initiatives to reform teacher education have been very similarly framed, inasmuch as governments have played important roles in establishing standards for what teachers need to know and do in their classrooms and in developing relevant assessments to regulate what students have learned and done (Tatto, 2006). However, when these surface-level similarities are analyzed more deeply, one uncovers competing forces with different expectations, foci, and approaches to teacher education reform (Cochran-Smith, 2001). Each of these approaches reflects different ideologies and appeals to different political interests, but none receives substantial empirical support (Apple, 2001; Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2001; Zeichner & Ndimande, 2008). Add to this that the contexts and cultural traditions of teaching and teacher education provide little opportunity for important teacher education reform initiatives and ideas to be realized (Feiman-Nemser & Floden, 1986; Little, 1990a, 1990b). Consequently, only an insightful and comprehensive understanding of these competing expectations, foci, and approaches to teacher education reform will have utility in informing future policy making and program development. The research community in teaching and teacher education must accept its notable and irreplaceable role in helping to develop such an understanding through an empirical base focused on the processes and outcomes of reform. In this issue of the Journal of Teacher Education (JTE), eight articles address reform and its complexities in the area of teacher education. In this editorial, we first highlight important arguments and findings that emerge from each article. Next, we challenge some of the authors' ideas with support from existing literature and suggest what further conceptual and empirical work is needed to understand dynamic and complex teacher education reform and its contexts. Reform With Competing Expectations for Learning Outcomes and Teaching Underlying various teacher education reforms are two related and seemingly irrefutable assumptions (Delandshere & Petrosky, 2004). First, the quality of teaching is the most important factor that influences student learning. Second, teacher education plays an important role in shaping quality teaching. However, these assumptions sometimes become conceptually ambiguous when used to guide the development of teacher education reform policy and programs. Theoretically speaking, student learning and quality teaching can be defined differently, depending on how one views society and education. Varying definitions imply a range of foci for teacher education reform. Following are three popular conceptions of student learning and teaching quality, as well as their respective foci for teacher education reform, which have made their way into various teacher education reform documents. …

1 Literature reviewOne of the important areas of study in second language teacher education (SLTE) research is the exploration of cognitions1 or mental lives (Borg, 2003) which has generated a great deal of interest since the 1970s. Throughout recent decades the cognitive dimension of teaching has been emphasized. The emphasis is mainly given to thinking and cognitions underlying their classroom instructional practices (Borg, 2006; Zheng, 2009). In fact, teacher education research has made significant contributions to the study of beliefs by examining the complex interactive relationship between teacher beliefs and classroom instructional practices so as to improve language teacher education (Borg, 2003; Gabillon, 2005; Phipps and Borg, 2007; Richards, 2008; Zheng, 2009; Wright, 2010; Busch, 2010; Phipps, 2010; Kuzborska, 2011; Borg, 2011; Inozu, 2011; Kelly, 2011). In this respect, an increasing amount of research has examined how beliefs are somehow reflected in classroom practices and how these cognitions influence and/or guide both pedagogical decisions and actions in classrooms (see, for example, Borg, 2003, 2006). Rather, teachers do in classrooms is in some way influenced by they actually think about L2 learning and teaching (Borg, 2009). Teachers' cognitions seem to have an influential effect on the way they teach, or rather, beliefs guide their classroom practices, as McDonough (1995: 9) suggested what we believe we are doing, we pay attention to, we think is important, how we choose to behave, how we prefer to solve problems, form the basis for our personal decisions as to how to proceed. However, beliefs are not always necessarily reflected in classroom practices (Phipps and Borg, 2007; Borg, 2009), that is, instructional practices may not sometimes be consistent with their own beliefs. In short, beliefs are viewed as a key aspect in SLTE and have recently become an important research area. Undoubtedly, this research has generated significant pedagogical implications for both pre-service and in-service teacher education. What is generally accepted so far in the research literature about the relationship between teacher cognitions and classroom instructional practices is summarized as follows (Borg, 2009: 3):- teachers' cognitions can be powerfully influenced by their own experiences as learners;- these cognitions influence and how teachers learn during teacher education;- they act as a filter through which teachers interpret new information and experience;- they may outweigh the effects of teacher education in influencing teachers do in the classroom;- they can be deep-rooted and resistant to change;- they can exert a persistent long-term influence on instructional practices;- they are, at the same time, not always reflected in teachers do in the classroom;- they interact bi-directionally with experience (i.e. beliefs influence practices but practices can also lead to changes in beliefs).Research on learning to teach which involves a complex developmental process has mainly focused on beliefs and perceptions (Johnson, 1994; Raths and McAninch, 2003), previous learning experiences within formal language classrooms (Velez-Rendon, 2006) and challenges of initial instructional practices during the practicum (Hudson et al, 2008), among other issues.Where do beliefs come from? The overall conclusion that can be drawn from the current SLTE research literature is that beliefs generally derive from their own learning experiences as language learners within formal classrooms (Pajares, 1992; Velez-Rendon, 2006; Ellis, 2006) - through apprenticeship of observation (Borg, 2004)-, early teaching experiences and teacher training courses (Popko, 2005) which significantly influence the way they view and approach teaching (Woods, 1996), even though other sources or factors that also contribute to the formation of cognitions are as follows: teaching experiences of works best in the classes (Mattheoudakis, 2007), principles derived from an approach or method (Richards and Lockhart, 1994) and knowledge sharing with colleagues (Sengupta and Xiao, 2002). …

Almost 2 years ago the editors of Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) announced a special themed issue of the journal on evidence, efficacy, and effectiveness in teacher education. Our goal was to gather a set of manuscripts about some of the current efforts in our field to generate empirical evidence about teacher education programs and pathways and/or to assess the efficacy and effectiveness of teacher candidates and graduates. This double issue of JTE (January/February 2006 and March/April 2006)--the final issues of the journal under the editorship of the Boston College group--includes ten articles on this topic. One way to think about these is in terms of four loose groupings: (1) empirical studies of the impact of differing teacher preparation programs and pathways, drawing on large-scale databases; (2) institutional or cross-institutional efforts to use performance and other outcomes data to assess and improve local practice; (3) analyses that take stock of the state of teacher education regarding the collection and use of evidence; and (4) articles that theorize research in and on teacher education's effectiveness and recommend new directions for the field. The first group--empirical investigations of the impact of programs or pathways--includes three articles. Boyd, Grossman, Lankford, Loeb, and Michelli describe the New York City Pathways study, which uses the New York City teacher workforce database as well as survey and interview data to examine how the features of different pathways lead to different outcomes, including performance, retention, and student achievement. Lasley, Siedentop, and Yinger discuss the Ohio Teacher Quality Partnership, which is based on the efforts of Ohio's 50 colleges and universities, state education authorities, and private corporations. Five studies examine the impact of teacher preparation on student achievement as well as how teachers add value and foster learning within the classroom. Noell and Burns report on data from the pilot study of the Louisiana Teacher Quality Initiative. This project assesses the value teacher preparation adds to pupils' achievement based on a massive multivariate longitudinal database, which is part of the statewide teacher preparation redesign effort. The second group of articles includes descriptions of systematic institutional or cross-institutional efforts to make evidence collection an internal teacher education activity that drives local practice and policy. Pecheone and Chung describe results from California's 2-year, statewide implementation of the Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT); they discuss how this can be used to support teacher candidates' learning and improve teacher preparation within and across institutions. Castle, Fox, and Souder compare the efficacy and performance of teachers prepared in professional development schools (PDSs) and non-PDS teacher preparation programs at the same university, based on analysis of student teaching evaluations and portfolio presentations. Darling-Hammond reports on the collection and analysis of a number of different forms of evidence gathered at one institution; she describes how these multiple assessment strategies are used to evaluate and improve the teacher preparation program and critiques the possibilities and limits of each. Articles in the third group take stock of the state of the teacher education profession regarding the collection and use of credible and persuasive evidence. Wineburg reports the results of a survey by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) to find out what kinds of data were being collected by teacher education institutions to meet the current demand for evidence; she calls for professional frameworks to guide the collection of teacher education evidence nationally. Fallon argues that there is too little research on teacher education that uses pupil learning growth as the measure of effectiveness. …

Qualitative teacher education research is concerned with understanding the processes and outcomes of teacher preparation in ways that are useful for practitioners, policymakers, and the teaching profession. Complexity theory has its origin in the biological and physical sciences, where it applies to phenomena that are more than the sum of their parts—where the “higher order” form cannot be created by just putting together the pieces that it is made from. Complexity theory has moved to social science, and to education, because many social phenomena also seem to have this property. These phenomena are termed “complex systems.” Complexity theory is also a theory of learning and change, so it is concerned with how complex systems are learning and changing. This means that methods to investigate complex systems must be able to identify changes in the system, termed “emergence,” and must also account for change over time and the history of the complex system. Longitudinal designs that involve the collection of rich data from multiple sources can support understanding of how a complex system, such as teacher education, is learning and changing. Comparative analysis, narrative analysis, extended case studies, mapping of networks and interactions, and practitioner research studies have all been used to try to bring complexity theory to empirical work in teacher education. Adopting a complexity theory approach to research in teacher education is difficult because it calls into question many taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of research and what is possible to find. Linear, process-product thinking cannot be sustained in a complexity framework, and ideas like “cause,” “outcome,” “change,” and “intervention” all have to be re-thought. A growing body of work uses complexity thinking to inform research in teacher education.

This study aims to identify emerging trends in immersive learning research in teacher education in order to provide researchers with insights into research themes and issues for further exploration. Specifically, the researchers scrutinised the research methods, research outcomes, and technologies employed in immersive learning research in teacher education from 2017 to 2023. For this purpose, 192 studies were detected by searching Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, Google Scholar indexes, and Springer links. This systematic review ultimately included 34 peer-reviewed, open-access articles. The study identified emerging trends in the current literature and analysed them as sub-dimensions; furthermore, it explored the potential outcomes drawn from immersive learning technologies in the teacher education context. This systematic review builds on previous ones by adding knowledge about the use of state-of-the-art immersive learning technology in teacher education.

Promoting teacher quality is fundamental to improving student achievement; therefore, managing quality in teacher education programmes has become critical to improving student outcomes (Chong and Ho in Int J Manage Educ 3:302–314, 2009; Cochran-Smith in Teach Educ 17:527–546, 2000; Darling-Hammond in J Teach Educ 51(3):166–173, 2000; Journal of Teacher Education 57:120–138, 2006; OECD in Teachers matters: Attracting, developing and retaining effective teachers. OECD Publications, Paris, 2005). Meeting the demand for high-quality teachers means ensuring quality in teacher education. There is now robust evidence to demonstrate that quality in teacher preparation directly impacts the quality of student outcomes.

Purpose: This systematic research paper provides a comprehensive review of studies and literature on three terms i.e., teacher education, teacher professional learning and teacher education research more specifically in the context of the Tanzania education system. One of the most important aspects identified in teacher education in recent years is teacher educational research despite being yet overlooked. Teacher educational research creates a better juncture through which a gap between teacher education and teacher professional learning is bridged and the two present well with one another.
 Methodology: The analysis used 45 articles related to the three aspects, published in ten years between 2012 and 2022. The findings indicate that through teacher education, teacher professional learning is up-to-date and kept on track by equipping and updating teachers with contemporary knowledge and teaching practices.
 Findings: In Tanzania, teacher professional learning is mostly done in form of workshops and seminars that few teachers from various educational institutions are allowed to attend. In addition, the integration of teacher education research content in teacher education is considered one of the approaches to facilitate teachers’ (both pre-service and in-service) capacity to draw on a wide knowledge base through teacher professional learning.
 Unique Contribution to Theory, Policy And Practice: Generally, the main focus of teacher education research should be to understand how teachers develop and acquire knowledge, and investigate the diversity of experiences in learning to teach, thus contributing to teacher professional learning program design.

ABSTRACTAction research methodology is commonly used in initial teacher education programmes as a pedagogical strategy to enhance student teacher learning. Action research is most often used in tandem with school-based practicum components in the latter stage of programmes as a means of bridging the theory-practice divide. It is also frequently used as a capstone assessment to assure prospective teacher capability for reflective inquiry. The study reported here focuses on the perspectives of teachers who were recent graduates of two initial English language teacher education programmes in Chile, who had undertaken action research projects as part of their degree programme. It also engaged the university-based supervisors who had overseen this work. These experiences are analysed in the context of the guiding epistemological and political foundations of action research. The outcomes of this research suggest that the use of action research in initial teacher education contexts may be more problematic than it is often assumed; particularly, where student teachers’ work is professionally isolated. From this, it is suggested that action research in initial teacher education needs to be conscious of potential constraints in school-based contexts, as these may act to limit the current and prospective impact of this learning experience.

In this chapter, teacher education researchers from Denmark, Australia, Wales and Northern Ireland critically analyse the place of universal views expressed as positive forms of universalism in teacher education. A key player in influencing these particular views of universal improvement in teacher education is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The chapter critically examines three publications from the OECD Education Directorate to illustrate how two positive views of universalism can be identified and linked to seductive ideas of improvement in teacher education. Using an alternative theoretical lens of negative universality, we argue that by adopting such positive views of universalism, different forms of absence, marginalisation and exclusion are being implicitly advocated by the OECD. Furthermore, we also explore how such positive forms of universalism can lead to cruel optimism in teacher education that may generate frustration, anxiety and exclusion. The challenge for teacher educators is understanding how the promises of positive universalism can capture our desire for improvement in ways that make us strive for non-educational objects, e.g., standards and ‘best practices’, that fail to support intellectual flourishing and ethical-political thinking, which are vital elements in (teacher) education.