This qualitative study aims to contribute to the discourse on teacher educators’ knowledge by examining the impact of digitalisation. To explore how digital competence is addressed in local curricula and what is expected of teacher educators (TEDs) in terms of preparing student teachers for epistemic changes, I thematically analysed the programme descriptions, course descriptions, and plans for school practicum from six Norwegian teacher education institutions. The findings show that TEDs are expected to focus on the (pedagogical) use of digital tools. However, they are also supposed to teach student teachers how to foster pupils’ digital skills and digital responsibility while addressing digitalisation’s influences on society and culture, subjects’ contents, and educational practices. The findings imply that TEDs need an understanding of digitalisation’s implications for epistemic practices to foster student teachers’ digital competence and transformative digital agency.

Teachers’ professional digital competence (PDC) refers to digital competence specific to the teaching profession. PDC serves a dual purpose: it encompasses a range of instrumental, professional, ethical, critical, and epistemic dimensions related to, on the one hand, teaching with digital tools and resources and, on the other hand, teaching pupils about digital technologies, digital skills, digital cultural expression, and broader digital and critical competences relevant to study, work, and everyday life. Teachers’ PDC is a dynamic concept that evolves in step with societal development and technological advancement.

Research on digitalization and school leadership is emerging, but remains fragmented and under-researched, as indicated in recent reviews. Based on this, we conducted a scoping review of 38 empirical studies published between 2014 and 2024. The review focuses on the descriptive characteristics of the field, how digitalization and digital school leadership are defined, which themes researchers address, and how existing research can be organized into emerging research streams. The findings show that the field is expanding, but remains scattered across disciplines and journals, with a strong geographical focus on Europe, particularly Sweden, and parts of Asia. Although qualitative and quantitative approaches are relatively balanced, mixed-method, longitudinal, and comparative designs are underused. As a result, much of the literature provides snapshot accounts or examines the relationship between digital leadership and teachers’ technology use. Digital school leadership is often treated as complex, yet this complexity is rarely unpacked analytically, leading to few studies of how leadership is enacted in everyday practice. Furthermore, the field reveals limited theoretical engagement and an unclear understanding of digitalization. The review also identifies a paradoxical approach to digital leadership. On the one hand, studies often lack explicit definitions; on the other hand, their research designs and methods create two knowledge logics: a predefined, expectation-oriented logic and a situated, practice-oriented logic. Consequently, the review argues for research that moves beyond individualized understandings of digital leadership and examines how it is enacted across organizational, technological, and governance contexts. It concludes by proposing a research agenda to address these gaps and guide future studies in more coherent and theoretically grounded directions.

Norway ranks high in digitalization in schools, with over 90% of students in grades 1–10 having their own digital device supplied by their school districts and reporting the highest use of digital tools globally in the latest PISA report. However, research shows that implementation processes and competence measures for teachers’ professional use of digital devices vary considerably between schools. This study aims to inform the development of research-practice partnership (RPP) measures focused on professional digital competence development in digitalizing schools internationally by exploring what teachers consider important for good teaching practices in 1:1 computing classrooms. We draw on both closed and open survey responses from 1505 Norwegian teachers in highly digitalized schools where the most experienced teachers have had 1:1 computing since 2014. The findings show that classroom management is seen as gradually more important with higher digital teaching competence and more experience, but that the teachers’ understandings of what digital competence entails and their use of classroom management strategies are rather limited. The study concludes that professional competence development measures that provide broader understandings of digital competence and classroom management are needed, dependent on competence levels and experience, as well as systematic training of students’ digital self-regulation.