It’s a declaration that every teacher educator has heard from their trainees: ‘I’ve passed all the teaching standards so now I am a teacher!’ The current structure of teacher education encourages the view that training is a series of experiences that, once completed, provide confirmation of competency rather than a construction of a robust and well rooted professional identity that we identified in a previous blog post (Wolstencroft & Gretton, 2020). Since the articulation of required teacher knowledge was captured in the form of teacher standards, it has been assumed that knowledge occurs at the point of performance (Verran et al., 2007), something which may not be wholly true as these performances must be consistently re-enacted into their own practice to demonstrate that any real learning has occurred (Tenenberg, 2016)
