Looking Back in Order to Move Forward: Lessons from COVID-19 for Teacher Education

Abstract

This article provides critical perspectives on education technology integration in a teacher education context in a post-pandemic world. The authors—two early career teachers, one in a pre-school and one in an elementary school, and two elementary teacher education faculty members at a mid-sized public university—use the U.S. Department of Education’s 2016 guiding principles for educational technology in teacher education for analysis. The commentary evolves directly from and reflects the authors’ collective experience across the P-20 spectrum in education technology, with close attention paid to what was learned during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent pivot to remote learning in spring 2020, which altered the teacher education landscape in significant ways. This article makes curricular and pedagogical suggestions for P-20 educators and concludes with recommendations for future research at the intersection of technology integration and teacher education.