A Guide to Teaching Practice

5th Edition

Louis Cohen, Lawrence Manion, Keith Morrison, Dominic Wyse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136949654
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A Guide to Teaching Practice is the major standard text for all students on initial teacher training courses in the UK.
Authoritative yet accessible, it covers the important basic skills and issues that students need to consider during their practice, such as planning, classroom organization, behaviour management and assessment. The book's focus on the quality of teaching and learning and consideration of the latest regulations and guidelines ensures that it fits comfortably within TTA and OfSTED frameworks.
In addition, comprehensively revised and fully updated, this fifth edition features brand new chapters on the foundation stage, legal issues, learning and teaching and using ICT in the classroom, as well as new material on numeracy, literacy, children's rights, progress files and gifted and talented children.
This book is the most respected and widely used textbook for initial teacher training courses and will be an essential resource for any student teacher.

PART I
SOME PERSPECTIVES ON TEACHING AND LEARNING

Education is context-specific and context-dependent. Context refers to the settings or surroundings in which education takes place. A student teacher is faced with the exciting but challenging task of assimilating a variety of contexts very rapidly when embarking upon teaching practice, whether during a course of initial teacher pre-service education or as a newly qualified teacher entering a first appointment in a school. These contexts vary from the very broad and general macro-contexts at a societal level to the very specific micro-contexts of a particular individual in a particular school, class and lesson. The prospect can be daunting. The thrust of this book is to support students in their initial teaching experiences – the micro-contexts of everyday life in classrooms. However, localised education is set in broader contexts of society. This part of the book sets the contemporary scene for daily teaching and learning in these broader contexts. It also describes some of the major themes of education in the last decade. Significantly, these include several developments and reforms from the government, changes to the requirements for student teachers and revisions to the National Curriculum. Important amongst these are the statutory requirements for the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), an area addressed by new sections in this book. Further, with the exponential rise of information and communication technology, a new, large chapter is devoted to this. In an increasingly litigious age there is a need for student teachers to know key legal matters, and a chapter discusses these. The convention used in discussions throughout the book will be to refer to students in initial teacher education as ‘student teachers’ and to children and young adults attending school as ‘students’ (or ‘pupils’ if there is possible ambiguity). Similarly, the terms ‘he’ and ‘she’, ‘him’ and ‘her’, are used alternately in order to avoid the more cumbersome ‘he/she’, ‘him/her’.

1
A Background to Current Developments in Education

INTRODUCTION

It is the first day of your school visit for teaching practice. You may have a mixture of anticipation, anxiety, excitement, eagerness, trepidation and more than a few butterflies in your stomach. That is entirely natural and to be expected. Maybe you have made a positive decision to be a teacher and this is the first time you are going into school not as a pupil. All change! You are one of life’s successes; you have gained a range of qualifications that have enabled you to reach this point. But here you are, a comparative novice whose only experience of education so far has been on the ‘receiving end’.

You want to teach; your experience of being taught may have been enjoyable (perhaps with a few negative aspects); you like the company of young learners and you have enjoyed the environment of a school; you like learning; you like knowledge; you like people and you like children. Maybe one of your relations has been a teacher and this has inspired you to want to teach; maybe you have been impressed by a particular teacher who taught you and you want to model yourself on him or her. There are many and varied reasons for wanting to teach.

So, here you are at the school gate. What will you want to find out? What will you need to learn? What will you have to teach? What will the class(es) be like? Where will you teach? What resources will you have? What will be appropriate for the pupils to learn? How will you teach? How will you keep order? How will you handle pupils with different abilities, motivations and interests? What will be your timetable? Will you like your class teacher or mentor? Will you meet the head teacher? Will the children like you? How will you gain respect? How will you plan your teaching? The stomach churns a little more!

These are all legitimate questions and concerns, and it is right that student teachers will have an expectation of answers; indeed, we hope that this book will help you to address them all. The point here is that, as a novice teacher, you need to find out a range of matters, and quickly. You need to look at the specific circumstances of the school, teachers, children, resources, curricula, assessment, discipline and so on; in short you need to conduct a rapid situational analysis and learn from this very quickly. You need information, guidance and support, and we hope to indicate how you can gain these.

How can you do this? We intend to set some of the terms of this situational analysis in this book and in this chapter. For example, with regard to the ‘what’ of teaching, we will draw attention to, amongst other matters, the National Curriculum and the detailed and helpful guidance that the government has provided for its implementation with children at all ages so that there is no uncertainty about what should be taught, to whom, when and in what sequence. With regard to the ‘how’ of teaching, we will cover a range of issues in, amongst other matters, pedagogy, planning, discipline, motivation, learning and assessment, and the government’s requirements for, and guidance in, these matters. With regard to the support for teaching, we will draw attention to the government’s guidance documents, to the roles of significant teachers at school (for example mentors, subject leaders and class teachers). With regard to what may be uppermost in student teachers’ minds – how to keep order and maintain discipline in order to promote learning – we will draw attention to the current situation in schools, how discipline ...