Preach what you teach! Teacher educators and congruent teaching

Abstract

Teacher educators seem to agree that, to be able to support their student teachers' learning, they themselves should be good models of the kind of teaching they are trying to promote. However, it is clear from the literature that this congruent teaching is not self-evident in teacher education. In the present article, we describe a small in-depth study, in which we attempted to establish whether teacher educators begin to teach more congruently when supported, and the factors influencing the occurrence or non-occurrence of such congruent teaching. To do so, we organised a workshop on the subject. Before and after the workshop, we interviewed the participating teacher educators, using videotapes of their lessons. To discover the possible contribution of the workshop to their congruent teaching, we later compared both interviews. We found that a particularly important aspect of congruent teaching, i.e. the teacher educators' ability to link their own teaching to theory, had improved. Our conclusion is that the acquisition of a language enabling them to talk about congruent teaching helps teacher educators to overcome problems with congruent teaching.