Teacher to Teacher Mentality: Purposeful Practice in Teacher Education

This text focuses upon professional discourse that revolves around induction efforts resulting from educators working together to inform one another’s practice. Teacher to teacher mentality is the product of purposeful practice as educators serve to inform one another’s preparation and development. Further, such mentality transcends boundaries to reach all levels of education and across contexts with cutting edge research and applications that promote the classroom teacher as associated teacher educator in the process. Therefore, this text is meant as a reflection of the current state of the profession and future research and development prospects pertaining to the concept of classroom teachers as associated teacher educators who through teacher to teacher mentality inform purposeful practice.
This text serves also as a tool for promoting professional discourse concerning the classroom teachers as associated teacher educators in this regard. This is such an important discussion to be had, and yet only recently has the teacher education profession more fully realized, acknowledged and emphasized the integral impact of teacher to teacher mentality of classroom teachers as associated teacher educators engaged in purposeful practice. Such dynamic interchanges of teacher to teacher mentality extend to teacher candidates, novice classroom teachers, and teacher educators.

Caroline M. Crawford is an associate professor of instructional design and learning technologies at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. She focuses her areas of impact upon instructional design, performance improvement, and learning theories within communities of learning, communities of practice and the appropriate and successful integration of technologies into differentiated learning environments of distributed including online and mobile, hybrid and traditional. Sandra L. Hardy is founder and executive director of Hardy Education Resources. Her primary areas of focus include research and development pertaining to leadership and induction of K-12 and higher education educators, administrators, and other educational professionals’ development and related programs. Her services are based on the unique needs of the individual teacher as learner in connection to promoting effective communities of practice through dynamic collaborations while identifying and securing the required multilevel resources.