We're back! And to celebrate the start of season 3 we're back together in person, recording safely outdoors (complete with strange background noises) to bring you a bumper first episode to help you get thinking about your philosophy.

As teacher educators, we sit in a sometimes uncomfortable place outside the schools where our students undertake their placements, and it's important for all of us to understand what we're for, what we do and why we don't just point student teachers at a school and let them get on with it. The Universities' Council for the Education of Teachers recently published a position paper setting out the principles on which we work, so we start by chewing that over with our good friends Dr Judith Kneen and Jordan Allers.

After that, we respond to a comment by our student teachers themselves that they'd like to know more about our own philosophies as teachers - we've got a collection of short pieces from colleagues around campus, and we explain our own philosophies as teachers.

Hopefully this will give you a nice bit of food for thought for the new school year. As we all get to grips with going back to school, having had a lot of assumptions and norms challenged over the past six months, this is a great moment to pause and ask yourself: what's my philosophy?

You can find the UCET paper here: https://www.ucet.ac.uk/11675/intellectual-base-of-teacher-education-report-updated-february-2020

Thanks to our colleagues who contributed to today's episode: Jordan Allers, Fiona Heath-Diffey, Dr Judith Kneen and Julia Longville.

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Recorded at Cardiff Metropolitan University's Cyncoed campus on 11th August 2020