High quality teacher educators are necessary for providing high quality education to teachers (European Commission, 2013). However, there is little agreement as to how teacher educators’ professionalism should be conceptualized and what it entails. The neo-liberal approach views teacher educators’ role as training student teachers to reproduce successful teaching methods. It suggests evaluating teacher educators’ professionalism by assessing their adherence to strict curricula and teaching standards, or through their students’ performance and perseverance as teachers. In contrast, the ‘academic’ approach claims that teacher educators have multiple roles in addition to second order teaching (teaching about teaching and learning and teaching how to teach). They mentor student teachers, act as gatekeepers of the profession, develop teacher education curricula, broker between higher education institutions, schools and other stakeholders, and conduct research (Lunenberg et al., 2014). These roles share broad practical and theoretical knowledge bases. They require a critical reflection upon practice and policies and a commitment to social justice and equity (Cochran-Smith et al., 2018). Although individual teacher educators do not need to perform all of these roles, they are typical of teacher educators’ work. Their professionalism is revealed through the reflective and committed manner of their work that is highly sensitive to context. In order to understand how teacher educators’ professionalism unfolds, it is crucial to conduct studies that examine teacher educators’ reasoning and actions within different work contexts (Cochran-Smith, 2021; Mayer, 2021; Vanassche, 2023).

This study is aligned with the academic approach to teacher educators’ professionalism. It aims to understand how teacher educators enact their professionalism by examining senior teacher educators’ considerations as they design an initial teacher education programme, and how the contexts of their work affect their decisions. The findings could provide policymakers with information about policies that promote and impede the provision of high quality teacher education to student teachers.

The study took place in Israel, where all initial teacher education programmes take place in academic institutions. This aligns Israel with the ‘academic’ conceptualization of the profession. Nonetheless, some of the education system’s characteristics are strongly associated with the neo-liberal approach. First, Israel’s investment in education, including teachers’ wages, is low in comparison to OECD countries (OECD, 2023a). As a result, it suffers from an acute teacher shortage, particularly in STEM subjects due to the lucrative alternatives that are available to bachelor degree holders in those areas (Weissblai 2023; Wiggan et al., 2021). Teacher education institutions compete against each other over student registrations, since the number of applicants is dropping (ICBS, 2023). Finally, the academic freedom of teacher education is somewhat constrained by the requirement to adhere to the Ministry of Education’s national curriculum frameworks.

The study focuses on programme leaders that work in a project called ‘From High Tech to Teaching’. The project retrains high tech academic professionals as high school STEM teachers. It takes place in several academic institutions, each offering programmes in some or all of the project’s subjects (math, physics, chemistry, biology and computer science). By choosing to focus on this project’s programmes, we tried to find the ‘middle way’ between an in-depth study of a single programme that may be too idiosyncratic, and a broad examination of a large group of programmes, that may be too heterogeneous and, thus, gloss over significant distinctions (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2015; Vanassche & Kelchtermans, 2015).

The research question are: 1. What are the professional reasoning processes of programme leaders while designing re-training programmes for academic former high-tech employees as high school STEM teachers?  2. How are their decisions affected by their work contexts?

Participants: The study included 18 (10 female) programme leaders from 12 teacher education institutions. (Fourteen are responsible for one programme in a specific subject area, whereas four others are project coordinators who are responsible for all of the projects’ programmes in their institution. Data collection: Semi structured interview protocols were used. Programme leaders were asked to describe it: the number of years their programme has existed, the number of semesters, study days, where the practical experience takes place and whether it is individual or in a group. Then they explained how the program changed over the years, what difficulties they encounter and how they would have devised the programme had they been provided with ideal conditions. The programme leaders were also asked about the challenges that students and alumni have to face. The interviews lasted for 45 – 90 minutes. They were audio-recorded and transcribed. Data analysis: We used the Braun and Clarke (2006; 2021) Thematic Analysis method. The analysis starts with repeated reading and free coding. The codes’ scope and definitions change as the connections between them are noted, articulated and organized. Finally, codes are used to build themes. Themes are not category names but full sentences that represent the central insights the researchers derived from the analysis of the data. Ethics: The authors are researchers at an Institute that hosts the project’s administrative unit. After receiving the institutional IRB’s consent, we approached program leaders, and asked them to be interviewed. There are no authority relationships between the authors, the administrative unit and the interviewees. The latter work for their respective academic institutions. Although the administrative unit knows who the program leaders are, we kept the identity of those that were interviewed confidential. We use pseudonyms in all of the study’s reports and all potentially identifying information was removed.

The analysis of programme leaders' reflections upon revealed four dilemmas that they had to navigate. The dilemmas exemplify how contexts and particularly state level policies affect programme leaders’ professional considerations (Craig, 2016; Darling-Hammond, 2017). 1. Selection vs. subsistence. Rejecting candidates that seem unsuitable for teaching is necessary to save public and candidates’ resources, and is part of the programme leaders’ role as gatekeepers (Lunenberg et al., 2014). However, it may endanger their program’s subsistence, since it is dependent upon a minimum number of student teachers. 2. Providing extensive preparation vs. minimizing the study load. As curriculum developers (Lunenberg et al., 2014), programme leaders wish to provide students with extensive preparation for the different classes and roles they would have, but students’ available time for studies is very limited. Studies overload may ‘push’ them towards less demanding programs in other institutions or deter them from retraining programs altogether. Scholarships could enable retrained students make the most of their studies, yet the funding they currently receive is insufficient. 3. Group vs. individual learning. Learning Groups provide students with emotional and professional support, and enable them to transform schools. However, the group limits students' opportunities to practice teaching an entire class and receive individual supervision. In this dilemma, programme leaders’ as mentors who care for their students (Lunenberg et al., 2014) may collide with their commitment to social justice (Cochran-Smith et al., 2018). 4. Preparing for the desirable vs. the ubiquitous schools. Teaching ‘best practices’ in excellent schools provides students with vital experience to become excellent teachers but may exacerbate their ‘reality shock’ (Veenman, 1984) when they start to teach in typical schools. This dilemma is exacerbated by the fact that in Israel, gaps between ‘ubiquitous’ and ‘best performing’ schools are large (OECD, 2023b).

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