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A Community for Teacher Educators

A place to think out loud with people who do the same work—preparing, mentoring, and supervising teachers across universities, schools, and districts.

Browse the Toolkits Explore Stories Visit the Shelf Get in Touch

Why a community, and why now

The Exchange has been two things from the start: a library and a conversation. The library is here—toolkits and stories from people who teach teachers. The conversation has been happening in ones and twos, over email and after conference sessions, and it deserves a room of its own.

The community is organized around the actual work of teacher education—coaching a candidate who isn't moving, rebuilding a program that has drifted, getting the research written—and open to anyone who does that work, whether you sit in a university or a school district.

The conversations, now open

Three spaces are live. Read them, reply, or start a conversation of your own.

What we'll gather around

Above are a starting set of spaces, each built around a piece of the work. They'll shift as members bring their own questions—this is a floor, not a ceiling. Below are examples of potential spaces for the Community.

$Tool Talk icon$

You put a protocol or activity in front of candidates and something happened. Say what: what you cut, what confused people, what you'd warn the next person about.

$Problems of practice icon$

Problems of Practice

Bring the hard case—the candidate who isn't moving, the mentor who won't budge, the observation you handled badly—and think it through with people who have been there.

$Program redesign icon$

Program Redesign

Moving from a stack of courses to a coherent program: sequencing, signature assignments, what accreditation actually requires, and the politics of changing any of it.

$Clinical partnerships icon$

Clinical Partnerships

Mentor teacher preparation, placement realities, and how a partnership gets past being pleasant to being genuinely useful to both sides.

$Becoming a teacher educator icon$

Becoming a Teacher Educator

For doctoral students and the newly appointed: the first course you teach badly, and the shift from teacher to teacher of teachers that nobody schedules time for.

$Research and writing icon$

Research & Writing

Research on teacher education and on our own practice: studies designed, drafts read, methods questioned, and deadlines witnessed by people who want the work to exist.

$Teacher education in the disciplines icon$

Teacher Education in the Disciplines

Science, mathematics, social studies, literacy, world languages, the arts: what preparation looks like inside a discipline, and what carries across them.

$Online and hybrid preparation icon$

Online & Hybrid Preparation

Teaching courses, supervising candidates, and building a cohort when part or all of the program happens at a distance.

Something missing?

Tell us the space you'd actually show up for and we'll open it.

Suggest a Space

Who it's for

Anyone whose work touches the preparation of teachers, in any setting.

$Teacher educators in higher education icon$

Teacher educators in IHEs

Faculty and clinical instructors teaching methods courses, running seminars, and supervising in the field.

$School-based teacher educators icon$

School-based teacher educators

Instructional coaches, clinical partners, and mentor teachers—the educators who do the daily work of teaching a novice to teach.

$Program leadership icon$

Program directors, chairs & deans

Department chairs, program directors, and deans responsible for coherence, accreditation, and the conditions the work happens in—load, budget, and who gets released to do it.

$District professional learning icon$

District PD leads

Colleagues who develop teachers after preparation ends—and who see most clearly what preparation left undone.

$Doctoral students and early-career faculty icon$

Doctoral students & early-career faculty

New to the role and learning it in public. Questions that feel too basic to ask a senior colleague are welcome here.

$Open to all icon$

Anyone curious about the tools

You don't need a title to join. If a toolkit is useful in your setting, you belong in the conversation about it.

$Policy actors and advocates icon$

Policy actors & advocates

Legislators, staffers, board members, and advocates with a stake in how teachers are prepared—welcome to listen in and see the work up close before deciding about it.

$Associations, agencies, and networks icon$

Associations, agencies & networks

State agencies, professional associations, accreditors, and funders that shape the field and need a clear view of practice inside it.

How we'll be together

Four commitments we'd like to hold from the first day. They are the price of admission and the reason the room will be worth your time.

$Practice first icon$

We talk about what we actually did, in enough detail that someone else could try it on Monday. Citations welcome; abstractions alone are not.

$Generous critique icon$

Generous critique

Push hard on the idea, never on the person. Assume a colleague is doing their best inside constraints you can't see from here.

$Discretion about students icon$

Discretion about students

Candidates, mentors, and pupils stay unnamed and unidentifiable. Share the case; protect the people in it.

$Give and take icon$

Give as often as you take

Answer a question, post a tool you adapted, read someone's draft. The room only works if everyone helps stock it.

In the meantime

The library is already open, and it is where the conversation will start.

$Toolkits icon$

Browse the toolkits

Thirteen tools for coaching, supervision, program design, and inquiry—free to download, adapt, and bring back with notes.

$Stories icon$

Read the stories

First-person accounts from the work of teaching teachers: what happened, what it cost, and what the writer would do differently.

$The Shelf icon$

Short perspectives on the books, reports, and resources worth a teacher educator's time—written by people doing the work, not by publishers.

$About the Exchange icon$

About the Exchange

Who we are and why this exists—plus services for institutions, our founding partners, and how to submit a story, tool, or Shelf perspective of your own.

Want to be there on day one?

Send a note and we'll invite you as soon as the doors open.