For quite some time educational research has faced criticism due to the fact that the findings from the research have not sufficiently managed to guide educational practice, whether it is teacher education in general or classroom practice. Back in 1984, Elliot W. Eisner wrote: "This experience [as a faculty member at three research-oriented universities] made it increasingly clear to me that research findings ... seldom - indeed, hardly ever - enter into the deliberations of faculties". What is the reason for this? One cannot help but wonder whether, or rather to what extent, this holds true still today. It seems that these concerns still persist (e.g. Vanderlinde and van Braak 2010), however, there are of course exceptions which point to the contrary. - This proposed paper will attempt to illuminate the positive evidence through examples of how educational research has indeed proven useful in practice. In this paper, the views of beginning teachers regarding their teacher education will be elucidated. The research findings in question consist of, on the one hand, longitudinal research that utilized the methods of narrative inquiry (e.g. Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) to explore the experiences of early career teachers during their first five years of teaching in grades one to ten in Iceland. On the other hand, the findings revolve around questionnaires with open questions which were sent to groups of beginning teachers at the end of their first year, for three consecutive years. One of the objectives of this research was to create knowledge which would make it possible to explore what kind of knowledge, skills and attitudes beginning teachers need, and if and how the findings could be used to improve teacher education. Accordingly, the research questions that pertain to these aims are as follows: 1) What did the novice teachers think of their teacher education program? 2) What did they find missing in the program?, and 3) What would they like to change in light of their (five years) experience of teaching? I intend to show how this research informed practice, i.e. how the research findings from these studies contributed to teacher education in Iceland, when, in 2009, it became a five-year Master’s Degree program: A new 25 ECTS course was created which simultaneously involves an extended period of practice teaching (a whole semester) and a weekly course-work at the University. The paper will moreover explicate the attitudes and views of the student teachers regarding this new 25 ECTS course, since one of its aims is to rigorously prepare them for the first year of teaching. The first group of teachers graduated from this new program in 2014. In order to explore whether this new course made a difference in the first year, a new study was initiated which involved formulating a new research question, namely: Do you find that the practice teaching and the course-work in year five (the "big" 25 ECTS course) was of benefit or useful to you during your first year of teaching? If so, how? As a result, the preliminary findings from this current study will be disclosed. The theoretical framework of the longitudinal study revolved both around phenomenology and postmodern theory (Creswell, 1998, 2007; Kvale, 1996; Taylor & Bogdan, 1998). And the central analytical perspective drew on the philosophy of narrative inquiry, which shaped the research methodology and the methods used. Given that this research has significantly informed and influenced the organization of teacher education in Iceland, it has the potential to impact education abroad as well as contribute to ongoing research in the field of teacher education in general.

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