Coming from teaching and local authority jobs I was staggered at the types of knowledge that teacher educators needed to have to support their professional decisions about how train new teachers. In addition there was the challenge of undertaking research, developing deep expertise in an area and publishing.

Crowd, by Geralt CC0 https://pixabay.com/en/users/geralt-9301/

Teaching computing in schools required one set of skills. Understanding how to prepare new teachers as a group to do the same required new pedagogic and subject content knowledge. Understanding how to be a researcher adding to the international body of knowledge required a whole new set of skills and knowledge. 

And then the challenge, as a teacher educator is how to keep up to date? 

That is what I get from colleagues in ITTE and from conferences – CPD for me, networking for research projects, benchmarking of practice and ideas and collaborative research and publishing.

Along the way I have been involved with ITTE colleagues in international conferences, consultancy with the British Council, OECD and UNESCO. 

Projects I have been closely involved in with colleagues include establishing the European SchoolNet www.eun.org, what is now the Knowledge Hub www.khub.net as well as the Learning to Teach in the secondary school series of textbooks and MirandaNet.

Currently I am working on new forms of publishing research-based knowledge for teachers using new digital tools to support teaching as a research based profession.  See www.meshguides.org.