Reimagining Teacher Preparation Programs

Tools and Resources to Develop Effective Teacher Educators

If we want excellent teachers, we need excellent teacher educators. Effective teacher educators use high-leverage practices and pedagogies to support novice teachers as they become excellent experienced teachers. Centers created these resources to identify and develop effective teacher educators in their network preparation programs.

Name	Type	Audiences*	Description
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: Cultural Responsiveness Diagnostic for Teacher Educators TeacherSquared		Course Instructors Candidate Supervisors Teacher Prep Program Director	This resource includes interview or survey questions and a rubric that provide baseline data on cultural responsiveness. During pre-hire interviews, employee onboarding, or annual management conversations, managers can use these tools to assess a teacher educator’s overall cultural responsiveness and plan individual or group professional development.
Excavating Teaching Protocol NCTR		Course Instructors Candidate Supervisor Mentor Teachers	The Boston Teacher Residency program works with its mentors and candidate supervisors to improve their ability to deconstruct or excavate their practice. This tool provides a guided approach to help teacher educators become better at making their practice explicit (and visible) with peers or residents.
Facilitating Large Group Practice: Planning Template TeacherSquared		Course Instructors Candidate Supervisors	This planning template outlines steps for facilitating practice sessions with a large group of teacher candidates. The template identifies specific steps of the process, including how to articulate specific outcomes for the practice protocol, anticipating pushback, and potential pitfalls for novice teachers.
Mentor Professional Development NCTR		Mentor Teachers Teacher Prep Program Director	NCTR adapted research on learning cycles to create this resource, which visually represents how to support mentors to improve their practice. Audiences can use this resource as a design framework for mentor professional development.
Planning a Mentor Professional Development Session NCTR		Mentor Teachers Teacher Prep Program Director	NCTR developed this resource to help its partners design and implement mentor professional development. Audiences can use and adapt this template to plan professional development for mentor teachers that work with teacher candidates.
Teacher Educator Practice Framework MA DESE, NCTR, TeacherSquared, TeachingWorks, US PREP		Course Instructors Candidate Supervisors Policymakers	This framework identifies the set of practices that teacher educators need to support and train novice teachers, sorted into three domains: plan, implement and improve. Each practice is defined, and includes a set of components that describe how teacher educators can enact it in their work. Audiences can customize this framework to meet the needs of teacher educators in their communities; for example, MA DESE’s version of the framework is available here.

This icon denotes tools that can be adapted and customized to meet your specific needs and context

This icon denotes resources that cannot be customized but can provide helpful guidance and reference material

*For the purposes of these toolkits, we define audience roles as follows:

• Candidate Supervisor: An individual employed by a teacher preparation program to supervise, observe and give feedback to teacher candidates in the clinical placements.
• Mentor Teacher: A classroom teacher who hosts a teacher candidate in his/her classroom.
• Course Instructor: An individual who teaches courses to teacher candidates in a teacher preparation program.
• Teacher Educator: An umbrella term that applies to all three of the roles above.