Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, many countries across the globe were forced to total or partial lockdowns which significantly affected all aspects of the education sector. Schools and universities had to close, resulting in the need for teachers and students to adapt to distance education practices. Teacher education is one of the higher education sectors most severely challenged by the rapid shift to online teaching and learning, since teacher education institutions and teacher educators were required to create appropriate learning environments for student teachers doing their teaching practice (Carillo & Flores, 2020). The need for equity-focused teaching and learning has also become a pertinent task for teachers to meet the social emotional and academic needs of students in challenging circumstances (Darling-Hammond & Hyler, 2020), calling for adequate readiness of teacher educators.

This paper will examine the professional development experiences of teacher educators (Bates, Swennen, & Jones, 2011)  in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Specifically, it will provide insights about the readiness of teacher educators for shifting to online teaching and learning, and will map the professional development activities that became available to teacher educators during the pandemic period. Teacher educators’ readiness gives indications to support the transitions and scaffold an appropriate approach to their professional development  (Billett, Wärvik, & Choy, 2018; Cutri, Mena, & Whiting, 2020). The readiness attitude of teacher educators considers how, in the current crisis context, they adapt their knowledge and repertoires of experiences (what they know), their capacities to achieve goals (what they can do), and the level of adaptation for shifting to online teaching and learning, and their professional development (Impedovo, 2020). 

As a theoretical framework, we adapt the concept of readiness to discuss teacher educators’ shift of pedagogical practices and to embrace the transformation of their professional development. Readiness comprises what individuals know, can do and value.  It refers to the individual’s abilities to engage with and learn effectively from what they experience, shaping the scope of their learning potential (Billett, 2015). As proposed by Billet (2015), the point is how to make sense of what the individuals are experiencing, construe meaning from it and learn through it. Specifically, the author argues that there are three broad dimensions of readiness associated with the knowledge required for practising healthcare professions, which are as follows: (a) conceptual, factual, propositional (what one knows);  (b) procedural readiness (what one can do); and (c) dispositional readiness (what one values). These dispositions are central to how individuals choose to engage in activities, and they also mediate the kind of effort that the individuals exercise in their thinking and acting and, therefore, their learning: “How, for what reasons, and by what degree individuals elect to engage in goal-directed activities is central to what they do and learn" (Billet, 2015, p. 4). 

In this paper, we are interested in exploring the teacher educators’ sense of readiness regarding the shift to online teaching caused by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The focus of the analysis lies on teacher educators’ attitudes towards their professional development and its perceived impact in helping teacher educators to cope with the challenges that emerged during the pandemic. We do so adopting an international comparative perspective.

Drawing on an instrumental case study design (Stake, 2005), the context of teacher education systems in Austria and France is considered, with the examples of the University of Graz and the Aix-Marseilles University providing illustrative data for teacher educators’ professional development. In both countries, professional development opportunities for in-school teacher educators are generally not satisfactory (OECD, 2020) and the same appears to be the case for higher education where professional development is voluntary. In Austria, most teacher education institutions are operating on distance learning since March 2020 and similar is the case in France, where the shift to distance learning was imposed by the national government and regulated by universities. Data were collected via document review and anecdotes of lived experience. The analysis of online document sources and particularly professional development opportunities published in university websites helps to reveal the exposure of teacher educators to professional development activities related to online teaching and learning. Anecdotes of lived experience are the outcomes of conversational interviews, which Van Manen (2016, p. 67) defines as a way to collect accounts of personal experiences in the form of ‘personal life stories’ (p. 67). This type of phenomenological research method calls for staying close to an experience as it is immediately lived by research participants. Five such interviews were conducted in each of the two countries. The interview transcripts and the documents were analysed deductively following the categorisation of readiness proposed by Billet (2015).

Findings indicate that different levels of readiness emerged from teacher educators in the two countries. The category "sense of conceptual readiness" shows the ability of teacher educators to make new conceptual links to manage the rapid teaching shift due to Covid-19, considering the repertoire of experiences that they had. At the same time, teacher educators felt the need for new knowledge in order to better adapt to online teaching and pedagogical literacy. The category “sense of procedural readiness” shows the changes into their role as teaching professionals, raising the need to rethink their practices with regard to using technology. The category "sense of dispositional readiness" is characterised with a renewed personal commitment towards the profession. The study of readiness with regard to teacher educators' professional development helps to deeply explore the transition of professional and development practices in the Covid-19 time.

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