Validating the Teaching and Learning Guiding Principles for Teacher Educators from the Perspective of Policy Makers and Teacher Trainers

This paper reports on the validation of the Teaching and Learning Guiding Principles for Teacher Educators by means of interviews with the two policy makers and three teacher trainers. Through document analyses of the prospectuses from certain reputable teacher education institutions as well as the policy documents from countries such as Finland, Australia, Singapore and USA the Teaching and Learning Guiding Principles comprising 6 themes were conceptualized, namely (1) intellectual excitement; (2) quality learning spaces; (3) constructive alignment; (4) international and cultural diversity; (5) climate of inquiry and critical reflection; and (6) nurture good values, attitude and behaviour. Nonetheless, the validity of the conceptualised Teaching and Learning Guiding Principles (TLGP) solely through document analyses is less rigour. Therefore, to increase the rigour, these TLGP were subjected to validation by experts consisting of two policy makers who once held the post of the deputy Director General of Education in the Malaysian Ministry of Education, and three senior teacher trainers at the Teachers’ Training Institutes. In the interview, these policy makers and teacher trainers were asked to provide their views of the conceptualised TLGP in terms of scope and breath. The interviews were recorded and subsequently transcribed so as to enable a recursive qualitative analysis. The results indicate that, while the policy makers and teacher educators were generally in agreement with the six themes in the conceptualised TLGP, they, however, extended these themes with two additional themes, namely (1) nature entrepreneurship and (2) value the mother nature. The validated Teaching and Learning Guiding Principles with 8 themes constitute the cornerstone of the development of Teaching and Learning Framework for teacher educators in preparing future teachers.