Professional development of teacher educators is an important issue. In order to be able to teach the teachers of the future, teacher educators have to keep their own knowledge and skills 'future proof'. When it comes to professional development, very often people think of 'attending courses'. But attending courses to keep up knowledge and/or skills, is only a small aspect of the broad range of possible activities to fill in ones professional development. A lot of professional development takes place at work, the so-called workplace-learning or informal learning.
In this study we look at the professional development of teacher educators through informal learning. Often forms of informal learning are not recognized by the learner, because they are so integrated with work. In this study the goal is to stimulate awareness of informal learning processes by teacher educators. Teacher educators use a logbook and report daily, weekly or once in three weeks what they have learned. After a three-week period they analyse their logbooks by looking at 'what is learned, 'how is learned', with or from who is learned'. This study has two types of outcomes: (1) awareness of the informal learning processes of the participating teacher educators themselves and (2) insights into the processes of stimulating awareness of informal learning processes. The study is in progress (march 2012) and we will present our findings at the conference in Antwerp.