A majority of studies have increasingly emphasized that a significant part of a teacher educators’ occupation - next to teaching teachers - is to conduct research (Lunenberg et al., 2014). Loughran (2014), for instance, describes teacher educators’ career as a ‘research journey’ (p.2). Taking into account this explicit focus on the development of teacher educators’ role as a researcher during their working lives, we present the development of a researcherly disposition as a promising concept to discuss teacher educators’ professional development. In particular, the aim of this paper is to (1) conceptualize teacher educators’ researcherly disposition and (2) to operationalize this conceptualisation into a measurable construct. First, and based on a theoretical framework, teacher educators’ researcherly disposition is defined as the habit of mind to engage in research which involves (1) an affective dimension, (2) a cognitive dimension and (3) a behavioural dimension (Tack & Vanderlinde, 2014). Second, this conceptualisation has been operationalized in a number of items in order to develop a reliable measurement instrument. Questionnaire data have been collected from a representative teacher educator sample (n = 800) occupied in Colleges of Higher Education and Centres for Adult Education in Belgium (Flanders). EFA, CFA and reliability analyses have been conducted on the data. Results of the EFA indicate a three-factor solution (with 18 items) that accounts for 52.9% of the variance. The first factor is ‘Conducting research as a teacher educator’, the second factor can be labelled as ‘Valuing research as a teacher educator’ and the third factor is ‘Being a smart consumer of research’. The constructed scales all have high reliabilities with Chronbach’s α of .88, .86 and .84, respectively. During the presentation, the results of these analyses will be related to background characteristics of the participants (for example, experience with research, gender, age).

Loughran, J. (2014) Professionally developing as a teacher educator, Journal of Teacher Education, 65(4), 1–13. Lunenberg, M., Dengerink, J. and Korthagen, F. (2014) The Professional Teacher Educator: Professional Roles, Behaviour and Development of Teacher Educators (Rotterdam, Sense Publishers). Tack, H., & Vanderlinde, R. (2014). Teacher educators’ professional development: towards a typology of teacher educators' researcherly disposition. (S. Lawes, Ed.) British Journal of Educational Studies, 62(3), 297–315.