Existing ways of knowing how to prepare people to become teachers were insufficient when COVID-19 closed schools, and some enduring hierarchies in teacher preparation were unsettled. This re-positioned qualified and student teachers as equally inexperienced in the circumstances. We contribute to post-COVID-19 educational research by considering the impact on student teachers through the historical socio-cultural lenses of phylogenesis (societal), ontogenesis (cultural) and microgenesis (individual). Our small qualitative study conducted interviews with four student teachers from undergraduate and postgraduate programmes whose practical placements, in a range of geographical contexts, were disrupted by school closures. Thematic analysis of student teachers' narratives during school closures identified how disrupted hierarchies became generative spaces for the development of student teacher professional agency. Though the initial ruptures of social activity have passed, successive global (financial, environmental, political) and personal crises characterise the current era, with implications for teacher education about developing student teachers' professional agency to cope with ongoing types of disruption in professional practice.