GROWING AS TEACHER EDUCATORS: Learning New Professional Development Practices

This paper focuses on two teacher educators in the process of altering their professional development practice. These educators are graduates of theMandelFoundation's Teacher Educator Institute (TEI), an intensive two-year program for Jewish professionals responsible for teacher education. TEI's overarching purpose is to develop in its graduates new visions and new practices that improve the quality of teaching and learning in Jewish schools. The program and its rationale are described in Holtz, Dorphand Goldring (1997) andDorph andHoltz (2000). TEI's objectives share much with recent efforts to alter professional development in general education, yet detailed studies of individual teacher educators attempting to learn new practices are rare. This paper explores how two teacher educators implement new practices in their own settings. It describes the pivotal moves each makes to engender new educational perspectives and the inherentchallenges of adopting a new paradigm for professional development.

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