Teacher educators have an important responsibility in being responsive to diversity, as they foster how issues of diversity, inclusion and equity are addressed in education by preparing the next generation of teachers (O’Hara & Pritchard, 2008). However, prior research on teacher educators’ ways of dealing with diversity has pointed out that they feel insecure and experience various barriers to be responsive to diversity (Ponet et al., under review). Well-designed professional development initiatives (PDI) are therefore needed to respond to these constraints. Unfortunately, in many national and higher education institutional policies only limited attention is given to PDI’s for teacher educators (Vanderlinde et al., 2021). In this study, it was our goal to investigate and describe the design for an impactful teacher educator PDI on responsivity to diversity. After a first consultation of the literature on effective PDI’s in education and the professional development of teacher educators (e.g., Merchie et al., 2016; Tack et al., 2021), a co-creative tailored-based approach for the design of the PDI seemed most promising. A case study design gave insight 1) into the context of two teacher education colleges in Flanders that participate in a PDI to foster teacher educators’ dealing with diversity, and 2) into the individual professional development needs of participating teacher educators. In particular, building on qualitative methodologies, semi-structured interviews were conducted (Mortelmans, 2011). On the one hand with all teacher educator participants (n=20), on the other hand with one key actor per institution that is involved in policy regarding professional development and regarding diversity, inclusion and equity. Additionally, the communication between the research team and the facilitators of the PDI were scrutinized. The data was explored via inductive coding techniques. Consequently 8 design principles for the PDI emerged from the data. For instance, the PDI should challenge their frames of references as a precondition to foster other practices; and include choices to focus on and cater the specific individual needs of the participants. Taking these design principles and the specificity of each teacher college in account, a new PDI was designed with tailored alterations to the specific contexts. This study adds to the field in a theoretical and practical way. Theoretically, the design principles expand the limited literature on teacher educators’ PDI for responsivity to diversity. Practically, policy makers as well as teacher educators themselves can find inspiration to design own PDI’s to foster dealing with diversity and make tailored alterations.

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