Why The Teacher Educator Exchange Exists

I have spent much of my career thinking about how teachers learn.

That work has taken different forms. I have taught future teachers. I have worked with practicing teachers. I have prepared doctoral students who were becoming teacher educators. I have studied teacher educator development. I have written journal articles and books, presented at conferences, edited scholarship, led programs, worked with colleagues in schools and universities, and spent countless hours in conversations about how we might prepare teachers—and the people who prepare teachers—more thoughtfully.

Those spaces matter. Conferences give us opportunities to encounter new ideas and people. Journals allow us to develop arguments carefully and subject them to critique. Books create room to build ideas at greater depth. Research gives us ways to examine assumptions, accumulate knowledge, and challenge practices that we might otherwise take for granted.

I believe deeply in all of those forms of professional knowledge. But over time I began noticing something that increasingly bothered me. Some of the most useful knowledge I encountered about teacher education was not necessarily appearing in those spaces.

It was sitting in an instructional coach's explanation of why she stopped giving teachers immediate answers. It was in the mentor teacher who had learned, after years of working with novices, that the first feedback conversation mattered differently than the fifth. It was in a clinical supervisor's way of navigating the tension between evaluation and support.

It was in the teacher education professor who had quietly redesigned an assignment six times because she was trying to help candidates learn to reason about teaching rather than simply complete another requirement. It was in the doctoral student becoming aware that teaching experienced educators required a different kind of expertise than teaching children. It was in the program coordinator who knew exactly why a promising reform had failed—not because the idea was poor, but because no structure existed to sustain it.

It was in conversations after conference sessions, over coffee, in school hallways, during mentoring meetings, and in the ten minutes after everyone else had left a Zoom call.

This was knowledge about teaching teachers. And much of it disappeared.

We have more knowledge than our traditional systems can hold

The problem is not that teacher educators are unwilling to share what they know. The problem is that our primary systems for producing professional knowledge were not designed to capture everything worth knowing.

Consider what we usually ask someone to do if they have learned something important about teacher educator practice. Conduct a study. Write an academic article. Prepare a conference proposal. Write a book chapter.

Those are legitimate possibilities. Sometimes they are exactly the right ones. But they also require particular kinds of time, expertise, access, incentives, and professional positions.

An instructional coach who discovers a powerful way of helping teachers interpret classroom evidence may never write a journal article about it. A mentor teacher may develop sophisticated practices for supporting beginning teachers but have neither the time nor the institutional expectation to publish them. A teacher education faculty member may learn something important through twenty years of supervising candidates yet spend most of her scholarly time writing for audiences that will never include the majority of people currently supervising teachers. A doctoral student may read rich scholarship about teacher educator development that remains largely invisible to the mentor teachers, instructional coaches, clinical supervisors, and professional learning leaders engaged in similar work every day.

The result is strange. We have enormous amounts of professional knowledge about helping teachers learn, yet much of that knowledge remains fragmented across schools, universities, research, mentoring relationships, professional organizations, conversations, and individual experience. The vision behind The Teacher Educator Exchange begins with the premise that no single university, school district, scholarly journal, or professional organization possesses all of that knowledge.

The challenge is not simply to produce more knowledge. It is to help more of the knowledge we already possess meet.

Scholarship is part of the answer, not the whole answer

I do not think the solution is to replace traditional scholarship with something faster, shorter, or less rigorous. That would create a false choice.

We need sustained empirical research on teacher education. We need theoretical scholarship. We need systematic reviews that help us understand what a field has learned. We need books that allow ideas to develop across hundreds of pages rather than hundreds of words. We need peer review and scholarly communities capable of challenging weak evidence and refining strong arguments.

But we also need other forms of public professional knowledge. A teacher educator should be able to describe a difficult moment in practice and make it available for others to examine. A mentor teacher should be able to share a protocol that has improved her mentoring conversations. A researcher should be able to translate a finding into language and tools that people outside a university library can use. An instructional coach should be able to ask other coaches how they are navigating the same dilemma. A doctoral student should be able to encounter the professional thinking of experienced teacher educators before being asked to figure everything out independently. A school-based and a university-based teacher educator should be able to discover that they are wrestling with versions of the same problem.

These forms of knowledge do not diminish scholarship. They can extend it.

Research can inform practice. Practice can expose problems that research has overlooked. Stories can make abstract ideas recognizable. Tools can translate ideas into action. Conversations can reveal where those tools fail. Those failures can generate new questions. And those questions can eventually return to formal inquiry.

The relationship can be symbiotic rather than hierarchical.

The missing space

Teacher educators have professional associations. We have journals. We have conferences. We have books. We have professional development. We have social media.

But we do not yet have a widely recognized professional practice home where the knowledge of teaching teachers can move easily among those spaces. That gap was central to the original vision for The Teacher Educator Exchange: a space located between scholarship, professional learning, media, and professional community rather than belonging exclusively to any one of them.

That is what I hope this becomes. Not another academic journal. Not another repository of downloadable PDFs. Not another professional organization asking people to join before they can access the useful parts. And not a website built around the assumption that university faculty are the only people who qualify as teacher educators.

The Teacher Educator Exchange begins with a broader proposition: anyone who takes meaningful responsibility for another educator's learning is engaged in teacher educator work.

That includes university faculty, certainly. But it also includes mentor teachers, cooperating teachers, instructional coaches, teacher leaders, clinical supervisors, induction leaders, professional learning facilitators, doctoral students, program leaders, and others whose work involves helping teachers learn. That broader community is the audience envisioned for the Exchange from the beginning.

And that means the knowledge base for teacher education must be broader as well.

What the Exchange is trying to do

The goal is deceptively simple: make teacher educator practice visible, shareable, and improvable.

The Exchange is designed as an open professional commons—a place where stories, practical tools, research-informed ideas, and professional conversations can circulate across roles and settings rather than remaining confined within them.

A story can make visible how someone navigated a difficult problem. A tool can make the professional reasoning behind that practice usable by someone else. A conversation can allow people to test the idea against very different contexts. Research can complicate the assumptions underneath it. Someone else can adapt the practice. And then the cycle begins again.

The aspiration is not merely to distribute resources. It is to create conditions for public knowledge building about the practice of teaching teachers.

That distinction matters. A library contains information. A professional commons allows people to bring knowledge, examine it, question it, adapt it, and build upon it together.

The Exchange should therefore preserve stories that might otherwise disappear, make useful tools widely available, invite disagreement and inquiry, help experienced teacher educators make their professional reasoning visible, and help people newly entering this work recognize the practice they are beginning to learn. Those aims sit at the heart of the larger vision.

Why now?

I have become increasingly convinced that we will not significantly improve teacher preparation without also improving the preparation and continued development of the people responsible for teacher learning.

We have spent decades asking important questions about what teachers should know and how they should be prepared. We need to ask with equal seriousness: Who teaches those teachers? Who helps that person learn to do the work well? Who prepares the mentor? Who develops the coach? Who supports the clinical supervisor? Who helps a doctoral student move from being an experienced classroom teacher to someone capable of teaching about teaching? Who helps established teacher educators continue improving their own practice?

And where does the knowledge needed to answer those questions live?

The answer cannot be only in journals. It cannot be only in universities. It cannot be only in schools. It cannot be only in research. The knowledge of teaching teachers exists across all of those places.

Our task is to create stronger ways for it to move among them.

A different kind of professional space

That is the experiment behind The Teacher Educator Exchange.

A place where an instructional coach and a professor might find value in the same story for different reasons. A place where a mentor teacher's experience is treated as professional knowledge worth examining rather than merely an anecdote. A place where scholarship is translated without being trivialized. A place where tools are not presented as universal solutions but as things to be used, questioned, revised, and discussed. A place where the people who do this work can ask one another difficult questions.

A place where someone can say: Here is what happened. Here is what I tried. Here is what I think I learned. What do you see that I do not?

That is not a rejection of traditional scholarship. It is an attempt to create another pathway through which professional knowledge can become public.

For years, I have participated in the established spaces of teacher education and benefited enormously from them. I will continue to do so. But I have also come to believe that improving teacher education requires us to create spaces those structures were never intended to provide.

Spaces where knowledge can move more quickly. Where practitioners and scholars can encounter one another. Where professional reasoning becomes visible. Where useful ideas do not disappear because the person who developed them does not have time to write a twenty-page manuscript. Where the expertise of teaching teachers can become something we build collectively.

That is the reason for The Teacher Educator Exchange. It is not meant to contain everything we know. It is meant to help the pieces find one another. And perhaps, by doing that, we can become a little better at the work that connects all of us: helping teachers learn.