Looking Forward: Honouring the Past and Changing the Present to Create our Future

This chapter considers what we have learned from the book and identifies some key issues that might need to be considered in the future. It starts by providing the author's personal history of how teacher education has changed over the time that ICET has been in existence, with a focus on its shift from a craft-based activity to a research-led profession, identifying some of the issues that arose during this journey. It uses the example of standards for school leadership and associated training programs as a way of explaining how different parts of the world judge excellence and how Neo-Liberal Public Management policies have changed the lives of teachers, school leaders and teacher educators as well. The chapter argues that such policies try to simplify what is a very complex process and in doing so have created a situation where fewer high school graduates want to become teachers and even fewer teachers wish to lead schools. The Scottish and Canadian examples are used as a means of demonstrating attempts to improve teacher education using collaboration rather than accountability measures and flags the possibility that there might be common elements of teacher education preparation that go beyond both time and location and that future exploration of a global approach might be something that ICET is well positioned to do in the future.