Teaching teachers to teach with technology: teacher educators’ practices

ABSTRACT

Despite the efforts of initial teacher education institutes (ITEs) to incorporate technology into their curricula, pre-service teachers (PSTs) feel insufficiently prepared to use technology effectively when teaching. To prepare PSTs to use technology in their future teaching practice, teacher educators (TEs), as second-order teachers, must both teach with technology themselves and teach about the use of technology in education. In this study, we investigate TEs’ use of technology, the extent to which TEs teach about different aspects of teaching with technology, and which groups of TEs can be identified based on these results. An online survey among 172 TEs at a Dutch University of Applied Sciences revealed major differences in how TEs teach with technology and which aspects of teaching with technology they address to prepare their students for their future teaching practice. Most TEs do not use technology regularly to support self-regulated learning or to provide differentiated instruction, nor do they prepare their students to do so. Three groups of TEs were identified: forerunners, a middle group, and laggards. Further research is needed to untangle the contributing factors explaining the differences between these groups, such as TEs’ competences and possibilities for professional development.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher educators
• teaching with technology
• technological competences
• second-order teacher
• professional development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Analyses on the results and reliability are available in Dutch for each measurement (www.ixperium.nl or through the authors).