Learning to be a Teacher

John Lange, Sue Burroughs-Lange, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781473960343, 9781473960336
• eBook ISBN: 9781526413000
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teacher Training

Being a successful teacher means constantly examining your own development to identify blind spots and ensure you engage on a meaningful level with teaching and learning. This book discusses theoretical and conceptual ideas, linked to direct strategies for the classroom, that guide students towards becoming proactive and effective learners, giving them the confidence to take charge of their professional future in teaching.

Built around a series of 'contributing ideas?, this book includes a conceptual framework for critically analysing and thinking about the teaching and learning environment. Examples throughout explore how to make the most of professional learning opportunities so students can take personal control of their learning, through self-regulation and self-monitoring. Strategies for making practical use of these ideas for classroom planning and preparation for learning are also included.

Section 1 A Learning Perspective on Teacher Development

Section 1 consists of two chapters:

Chapter 1 Your professional learning consciousness

Chapter 2 Becoming a self-regulating, autonomous professional

These first two chapters explore how to establish an approach to your professional learning that is self-regulatory and self-monitoring. This approach encourages and empowers you to assume increasing control of your professional knowledge and expertise. Some basic theoretical and research perspectives are also covered.

The teacher as a learner is an inquisitive professional who seeks self-awareness (see Feiman-Nemser, 2012). Through focused enquiry and interpretative strategies, you are enabled to assume responsibility for your learning, including when colleague support may not always be available. Input of a mentor or colleague to challenge your evolving professional awareness can also be significant in supporting your early learning for teaching. But with expanding demands on school and university personnel, your professional progress may also depend on your ability to access and enhance your own learning. If you are to develop self-management of your learning, you will need to adopt both organizational and analytical strategies to achieve this. Acquiring the associated language of enquiry and interpretation of professional learning also adds communicative purpose to your learning process.

The professional knowledge and expertise that you will need to acquire during your initial teacher education programme can be placed within three interlocking and reciprocal contexts. These are: the education system (locally and more broadly); the school and classroom; and your individual personal, professional environment. It is within and across these domains that you access and engage with the social and intellectual processes that provide the basis for developing knowledge and understanding of your own learning. Your professional learning is drawn from experiences where you initiate and respond to theoretical and practical dimensions in the classroom, and by a more direct awareness of intellectual processes that support how you can learn effectively and with purpose.

This concept of professional learning relates to two interacting and complementary sets of knowledge, understanding and skills. The first set is the identification and construction of knowledge, and the application of content and pedagogical skills. The second knowledge set is the intellectual ability to investigate, understand and apply the knowledge and skills inherent in your own learning context. The latter conceptualizing process is crucial if you are to fully engage with the complex content knowledge, understanding and application required to successfully engage students in classroom learning activities.

Learning how you acquire, modify and create responses for learners, facilitates self-regulation in your control and management of the complexities of teaching and learning. Learning what and how to teach provides the content context of professional learning; it is learning how to learn, its enquiry and interpretative awareness. This provides the unique and major focus of Section 2 of this book.

A special kind of teaching consciousness

Professional learning outcomes usually originate from sources that are both external and internal to the teacher-learner. Evolving ownership of ways of knowing will enhance the possibility of engaging in higher level understanding and in recursive, self-initiated, constructive processes of learning. This places you in pivotal control of:

• enquiry strategies that can guide and enhance your own professional learning activities
• processes for implementing and developing aspects of the curriculum
• creating teaching and learning activities in response to both pedagogical and learner needs.

You need to consider the theoretical base for developing an individual learning consciousness that encompasses an awareness of the content and processes of curriculum and pedagogical learning and, more importantly, of the intellectual process that you use to develop professional knowledge and understanding of your role and its associated expertise. At its core, this book provides a number of cognitive strategies to guide you in developing a deeper understanding of your teaching role and to formulate relevant responses to identified professional learning initiatives from teaching and learning episodes. In Section 2, these strategies are placed within a theoretical and research perspective to support you in:

• reviewing teaching initiatives
• focusing on and extending observing and planning skills
• managing the learner and learning process.

The approach to professional learning that is promoted in this book is mirrored in the ways that the teaching and learning process is discussed. The theoretical understanding and articulation of what you are able to do provides a sound platform for individual and authoritative creativity in your professional learning processes. As well as developing effective communication skills with young learners, you want to be able to explain and justify how you are engaging learners, why in this way and for this particular programme.

1 Your Professional Learning Consciousness

Having read this chapter, you will have an understanding of how:

• differing contexts you encounter can provide for your knowledge and learning about teaching
• your talk about teaching tells a story – developing a theoretical and practical language of enquiry and interpretation
• you can generate change in yourself through enquiry and self-observation
• to use scaffolding to manage your own tailored learning
• this lift in your cognitive and affective functioning supports you to generate your own responses to teaching and learning challenges
• you can transform your learning though a pattern of awareness, theorizing and interpretation.

The most important feature of this chapter is the individual focus on your learning to teach and why and how you can become a self-observing, self-regulating, enquiring, outstanding professional. Let us first consider the particular contexts in which you can develop your teacher self-awareness.

The contexts of your knowledge and learning about teaching

The education system, university and school context

The widest context of professional learning is provided in the teacher education curriculum that is the outcome of both society’s and the education system’s requirements for the preparation and on-going support and guidance of teacher-learners. The defined curriculum of teacher education is dependent on subject input, both theoretical and research, regarding knowledge acquisition and pedagogical awareness. It is generally provided in partnerships between university and school personnel.

Over recent years in England, the balance between the academic, university-led contribution and time in school settings has changed. According to their particular philosophy, government agencies endeavour to respond to the perceived value of education generally, through university teacher education and the training of individuals who will provide teaching for the children and youth of society.

An emphasis on teaching as learning what and how to teach, as a practical apprentice-type activity, primarily values time in classrooms. This results in proportionally less time in university settings to explore the pedagogical and research components of any curriculum subject. This constrains teacher education to accessing specific knowledge and understanding of the subject from academics who have made that knowledge discipline the focus of their intellectual lives. You also need to learn the psychology of how knowledge accessed this way can be used to plan learning for students. Knowledge cannot be transferred by osmosis from a subject expert, leaving you, as teacher-learner, to transform it into classroom teaching. Developing as a teacher requires expertise in both content conceptualization and organization; and responsive and relevant pedagogy for your students.

The personal professional learning strategies identified in Section 2 are not particularly concerned with what might be provided by academic subject specialists in the traditional content areas, such as mathematics, science, history, geography, language and literacy, or with the theoretical and research-oriented subjects of educational psychology, philosophy and sociology. Examples are ‘how the reading skills of specific learners are to be introduced, maintained and enhanced’ or ‘how the reading skills of reluctant learners are to be encouraged and reinforced so that they can access other curriculum subjects’. These: (i) would be a component of the pedagogy offered in an English language course in the university, (ii) could prompt an individually focused critical review by you as teacher-learner, and (iii) would be further clarified by you in a focus on effective implementation in your classrooms.

School-based requirements may be localized responses to national policy and curriculum statements. You can interrogate and interpret these with a view to integrating them into your range of teaching skills. You can use the professional learning agenda (PLA), set out in Chapter 4, to manage this process. Most primary and secondary schools will have a range of policies and programmes implemented across all classrooms and subject areas, such as the expected requirements of students’ behaviour. You will have these strategies available to you to respond directly to off-task incidents with learners and to social behaviour that does not conform to normal expectations.

There will also be classroom curriculum and management patterns, adapted by mentors and teaching colleagues, to which you will initially need to adhere – for example, the development of teaching responses to learners who are exhibiting either significant success in a specific subject area or learners who have demonstrated that they require additional help and support. It is your responsibility not only to know about and to respond to such school initiatives, but also to develop a range of intervention strategies and approaches for use in specific instances with your learners that are congruent with stated school policies. An enquiring, theorizing, interpreting and generating strategy is useful in developing and extending your approaches. This will become more relevant as you learn to take increasing control of classroom management and teaching. You can ready yourself for these growing responsibilities by observing, interrogating and interpreting individual teacher responses. You can do this through informed listening to colleagues and children, and by generating potential initiatives that you have identified using your enquiry strategy (see Chapter 3, REACT).

The context of the classroom

The classroom environment is a very relevant and potentially productive context for your professional development. It holds the opportunity for you to personalize your knowledge and understanding of teaching and learning. You will want to go beyond being a copier to becoming an implementer who develops ways of responding to teaching and learning episodes; and to move deliberately towards having executive control of your professional development. You will want to investigate and theorize about potential approaches, strategies and skills that best fit your current levels of understanding and individual expertise in working effectively with learners.

What you interpret and understand from the observation of and discussions with informed others, such as colleagues and mentors, can provide a basic framework to which your evolving ideas and responses can be added. Eventually, your deliberations and elaborations will make this conceptual framework into a meaning-making tool or habit for you. An on-going personal agenda for learning how to learn and the associated concepts of what and how to teach, will provide you with a growing intellectual capacity and associated skills to make relevant decisions for yourself and the learners you teach.

The context of self

Questions you may ask yourself as you learn to teach include:

• How do I make sense of the order of the classroom?
• What is really happening here?
• Where do I fit comfortably?
• What strategies can support identifying and processing my current professional learning?
• What form of a professional learning agenda could provide a pedagogical resource for supporting my meaning making and my expertise in how to respond?

Some potential answers follow. Though you have spent a considerable proportion of your life in various classrooms, the immediate challenge on a school experience placement or first job appointment is to recognize the duality of your continuing roles in education. The first challenge is accepting the role of teacher, that is, someone who is responsible for creating, organizing and managing the continuing education of a group of learners. We refer to this throughout the book as learning the what and the how to teach. Your second challenge is to focus on learning how to learn, with the varied support of colleagues and course experiences. The enormity and immediacy of taking on these dual roles can seem overwhelming. How will you survive and grow? What content and skills, in planning, resourcing, teaching and behaviour management, will you need to acquire immediately? Once a professional learning approach has been identified and implemented, how might you continue to enhance it? What is there to observe and understand in this classroom? What are other teachers doing? How are the children responding? What makes or encourages the students to act in a certain way?

Observing in a classroom, your first impressions might be students seeming to work quietly and productively with only limited input and interactions by the teacher. Based on the surface interactions and engagements, everything seems to be running smoothly. Let us assume that the teacher presents a prepared introduction to the lesson, identifies or reminds students of some rules of how the learning activity is to be conducted, and then the teacher wanders around the room to check on individuals and small groups of learners. You see the teacher support learners who need additional help or guide those learners who need to extend the nature and complexity of the learning task. Is this what teaching is really about?

This may look like an easy process to follow, but ask yourself: what did the teacher prepare beforehand to make this classroom run with seeming clockwork precision? Had the management and monitoring of the learners required significant prior training time to achieve? How can you know when to intervene with a learner’s task completion, or offer guidance or further support, as the teacher being observed seems to manage so easily? How is this seamless interaction between the teacher’s work and the students’ learning, and the associated task, arrived at in this classroom? How was trust in engagement in the activity built and maintained between teacher and learner?

At first, the many questions that classroom observation generates, may ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Illustration List
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section 1 A Learning Perspective on Teacher Development
• 1 Your Professional Learning Consciousness
• 2 Becoming a Self-Regulating, Autonomous Professional
• Section 2 Professional Learning Strategies
• 3 Self-Monitoring Teaching and Learning
• 4 The self-Regulation of Professional Learning – the Professional Learning Agenda
• 5 Advancing Your Professional Learning
• 6 Refining Professional Learning Through Review and Interpretation
• 7 The Planning Process
• References
• Index