This state-of-the-art Companion assembles and assesses the extant research available on teacher education and provides clear guidelines on future directions. It addresses an important need in a collection that will be of value for teachers, teacher educators, policymakers and politicians. There has been little sustained, long-term or systematic research to provide empirical support for the broad aspects of teacher education policy, largely because such research has been chronically underfunded and based on traditional practitioner knowledge. Many of the changes to teacher education are contentious and yet are occurring in rapid succession. These policies and movements have important consequences for education, teacher quality and the future of the teaching profession. At the same time, the policies and initiatives that support these changes seem to be based more on ideology, business interests and tradition than on research and empirical findings. The nature, quality and effectiveness of teacher preparation have increasingly become a central focus for education policy worldwide in a fiercely argued debate among governments, think-tanks, world policy agencies, education researchers and teacher organisations.

Michael A. Peters is a Professor at the Wilf Malcolm Institute for Educational Research at the University of Waikato, and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the executive editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory and has written over seventy-five books. He was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2010 and awarded honorary doctorates by the State University of New York (SUNY) in 2012 and the University of Aalborg in 2015. Bronwen Cowie is a Professor of Education and Director of the Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research at the Faculty of Education: Te Kura Toi Tangata, the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Her research interests span assessment for learning, science education, student voice, curriculum implementation and teacher education/ professional learning. Ian Menter is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in the UK and served as President of the British Educational Research Association (BERA) from 2013 to 2015. He is an Emeritus Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Oxford and was a member of the Steering Group of the BERA Inquiry into Research and Teacher Education (2014).