Helping Teachers Meet the Standards: New Challenges for Teacher Educators

In this article we describe the curricular standards that currently concern teachers and teacher educators alike. We propose that these reforms pose 3 significant challenges for teacher educators. First, the reforms are based on changing images of good teaching. Second, the teaching that lies at the heart of the reforms is undetermined and uncertain. Third, there is little theory concerning how beginning teachers learn to teach in these ways. Given these 3 challenges, we sketch-in broad strokes-several avenues for investigation that teacher educators may consider as they re-formulate teacher education programs in this standards-based era of educational reform.