Mentoring Student Teachers

The Growth of Professional Knowledge

John Furlong, Trisha Maynard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135096236
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In the UK and elsewhere, the training of teachers is increasingly seen as a matter of partnership between schools and institutions of higher education. There is thus an urgent need within the profession to define more carefully what the role of teachers acting as mentors should be. Clearly some aspects of professional knowledge can only be acquired from practical experience in school, and this book draws on extensive research on students' school-based learning to isolate and analyse those aspects. Like any form of teaching, mentoring, the authors suggest, must be built on a clear understanding of the learning processes it is intended to support. In this book, they report on their research into the nature of students' school-based learning and what this means for the role of the mentoring.

Chapter 1

Practice makes perfect?

The development of school-based teacher education in Britain

The classroom, recognised as the critical productive site of all educational enterprise was – and remains – beyond the continuous control of church or state. Only the teachers were –and are – continuously there. For the interest of church and increasingly of state, an enduring problem, therefore, has been to ensure that the teachers operated as effective agents of a higher authority. This was the central purpose behind the state’s entry into the sponsorship and certification of teacher training in 1846. From that moment, effective forms of training … were envisaged not simply as mechanisms to improve the quality of schools, but also to regulate and direct the daily activity of the teacher in the classroom.

(Gardner 1993: 23)

The Secretary of State publishes criteria by which he will judge whether courses offer suitable preparation for teachers, in the context of the Government’s policy objectives for schools.

(DFE 1993a: para 8, emphasis added)

In the United Kingdom, a succession of government circulars (DES 1984,1989; DFE 1992,1993a) has ensured that in future, the vast majority of secondary and primary initial teacher education courses will be planned and delivered through partnerships between schools and higher education institutions. In addition, the ‘curriculum’ for these courses is now prescribed in a series of government-defined ‘competences’ on which students are intended to focus throughout the course of their training. In future, it will therefore be teachers, acting as ‘mentors’ to students, rather than those in higher education, who will have the key role in the professional preparation of the next generation of teachers. As a result of these changes there is an urgent need within the profession for a clearer understanding than we have had in the past of precisely what the role of the mentor should be.

As we indicated in the Introduction, the central argument underlying this book is that a fuller prescription of the role of the mentor will not be achieved until we have a more thorough understanding of the processes involved in learning to teach. Like any form of teaching, mentoring, we suggest, must be built on a clear understanding of the learning processes it is intended to support.

The primary purpose of this book is therefore to report our own research with PGCE (Post Graduate Certificate of Education) students at University College, Swansea, into how students do indeed learn to teach; how, through their school-based experience, they develop the practical professional knowledge necessary to become competent teachers. After reporting this research, we are then able to go on to propose what the role of the mentor should be in supporting that development. But in order to place our study in context, it is necessary to begin by asking how it is that policy on teacher education has come to take the form that it has. How is it that initial teacher education in Britain should be conceived primarily as the achievement of a series of practical competences and that practising teachers, working in schools, should be seen as prime contributors to professional development? Such a view of professional preparation is certainly very different from that promoted in other periods of our recent history and it is different from approaches adopted elsewhere in the world.

The purpose of this first chapter is therefore to place our current study in historical context by charting the political and professional development of policy and practice in initial teacher education. In that history we are particularly interested in the ways in which, at different times, the school-based aspects of teacher education have been understood as well as the relationship between school-based and other types of professional preparation.

THE FIRST APPRENTICE – THE PUPIL-TEACHER

The fortunes of initial teacher education in this country over the last century and a half have, necessarily, been bound up with the changing relationship between the state and the teaching profession as a whole. At times, governments of the day have been content to grant teachers a degree of relative autonomy in their work; at those times, teacher educators too have been granted some autonomy. At other times, governments have wanted to regulate the teaching profession more directly and teacher education has often been seen as a key strategy for achieving such regulation.

Direct regulation of the teacher through their professional formation was certainly an aim that was to the fore throughout the nineteenth century. Teacher education during that period was characterised by the twin aims of being pragmatic and moral. Its structure and content were closely regulated by government and specifically intended to make sure that elementary school teaching remained a craft rather than a profession. Each new generation of ‘the teachers of the people’ (Grace 1978) had to learn their craft in accordance with the government-imposed Revised Code.

The most important aspect of state-sponsored initial training was the pupil-teacher system. Set up in 1846 by Kay-Shuttleworth, the pupil-teacher system was initially designed as a ‘supply mechanism’, allowing working-class pupils who were 13 years of age to be apprenticed to the school managers for a period of five years prior to going on to college. As Gardner (1993) notes, the conventional view of professional preparation was reversed: practical training was to come first; personal education was to come second, if at all. The training, such as it was, was based on an apprenticeship model. Pupil-teachers would teach in the school during the day and were then supposed to receive instruction in school subjects from the master or mistress for a further l½ hours (Aldrich 1990). However, as Gardner documents, in many cases this did not happen and most of the training was of the ‘sink or swim’ variety.

In many cases, the trainees’ education was neglected and he or she effectively became a full-time, if temporary, addition to the staff of a school. Pupil-teachers were often pitched in at the deep end, finding themselves at the age of 13 or 14 teachers of children who a year or two earlier, had been their playmates. It was a difficult baptism, but a surprising number of trainees … seem to have picked up the mechanical skills of classroom discipline and rote learning without much difficulty.

(1993:28)

Upon completion of their apprenticeship, candidates could compete for the Queen’s scholarship which would enable them to go on to training college and so achieve a teacher’s certificate. The majority, however, did not and remained uncertificated assistants paid at a lower rate than their colleagues.

Those students who did arrive at college were assumed to be competent classroom practitioners. As a consequence, college training was more concerned with their personal and moral education than improving competence in the classroom. Only six weeks of the two years were given to school practice, the rest of the time being devoted to academic subjects other than education. But the training that was provided was more than just academic – it was first and foremost ‘moral’. As Hencke (1977) records, students were subjected to a long and arduous timetabled day and led a monastic existence and, as a result of this ‘laborious and frugal life’, they went ‘forth into the world humble, industrious and instructed’ (Kay-Shuttleworth, 1862, quoted in Aldrich 1990: 18). As we will see, this construction of training as a moral activity did not entirely pass away with the pupil teacher system –remnants continued into the training colleges of the 1950s.

FROM PUPIL-TEACHER TO STUDENT TEACHER

Throughout the nineteenth century, therefore, responsibility for the practical preparation of new teachers lay largely with the teaching profession itself. It was practising teachers who were granted primary responsibility for inducting the next generation into the craft of the classroom. But again, as Gardner (1993) documents, the pupil-teacher system started to wither on the vine once alternative routes into secondary education were opened up. Scholarships to grammar schools meant that it was no longer necessary for the more affluent working-class pupils to become apprentice teachers if they were to continue their education, and by the 1920s, the pupil-teacher scheme had largely fallen into disuse.

The end to the pupil-teacher scheme coincided with the emergence of a different relationship between the state and the teaching profession. In the early years of the century, Grace (1987) has suggested that relations between the state and the profession could be characterised as ones of ‘cultural and professional condescension’. However, by the 1920s, with the threat of significant teacher and trade-union radicalism, the state adopted a more conciliatory attitude towards the profession. It was during this period that the Conservative President of the Board of Education, Eustace Percy, recognised that the best guard against the politicisation of education was to give teachers a reasonable sense of independence. It was the beginnings of what Grace has characterised as ‘legitimised professionalism’: reasonable pay, reasonable conditions, greater control over the curriculum, in return for a non-political professionalism. This period coincided with growing autonomy for teacher educators too.

The expansion of secondary education for prospective teachers had a profound effect on the role of the training colleges in two important ways. In the first place, colleges found that they had a changing clientele. They no longer had to provide secondary education for working-class students and this freed them to devote some of their curriculum time to the study of educational theory. This was particularly true of the more autonomous Day Training Colleges associated with the universities which began to appear after the 1890s. Second, colleges found themselves accepting students who were better educated than in the past but with no prior experience of teaching. Moreover, the growing number of middle-class recruits meant that an important proportion of the student population were quite unfamiliar with elementary schools. As the students were in college rather than in school, the task of preparing them in the practical business of elementary school teaching largely fell to college tutors. In the decades around the turn of the century, therefore, responsibility for the practical preparation of the next generation of teachers slowly moved out of the hands of the teaching profession and into the increasingly autonomous world of the college; teachers’ formal responsibility for training all but disappeared for the next sixty years.

THE POST-WAR PERIOD

The growth of the relative autonomy of the teaching profession from state intervention, which had begun in the 1920s, reached its height in the post-war period. Between the 1940s and the early 1970s, teachers achieved significant control over the school curriculum. As Grace (1987) notes, they did not achieve the major economic rewards, nor the professional autonomy of other professions, but in that most central aspect of their professionalism, the school curriculum, they were granted substantial freedom by the state; it was a ‘licensed autonomy’ (Dale 1989). Indeed, their control over the curriculum became the most significant aspect of their claim to be a true profession. As we will see, that professional autonomy was mirrored by autonomy in the curriculum of teacher education too.

In his study of teacher education institutions in the same period, Bell (1981) charts the structural changes that affected institutions and the impact of those changes on the way in which teachers were actually trained. Three types of institution succeeded each other during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s – the Teacher Training College was transformed into the College of Education which was itself later transformed into the Institute of Higher Education or Polytechnic. Bell suggests that the vision of teacher education offered in each type of institution was different, broadly following the progression of Weber’s (1948) three ideal types of educational structure – from ‘charismatic education’, to education of the ‘cultivated man’, to ‘specialised expert training’.

Teacher education in the Training College of the 1950s was, Bell suggests, a form of charismatic education. Colleges were typically small, single-sex and physically and intellectually isolated, ‘all factors which enhanced its capacity for creating a moral community’ (Bell 1981:5). Colleges were run as a collegiate community and relationships between the staff and the students were close and personal. The curriculum was largely undifferentiated and although ‘main subject studies’ began in the 1950s, they did not achieve much significance until the 1960s. As a consequence, the most important person to each group of students was the education tutor, usually a woman (Taylor 1969), who had responsibility for education theory, curriculum work and for supervising teaching practice.

Tutors maintained close contact with local schools and, according to Taylor (1965), school teachers were their most significant reference group. Their main claim to expertise lay in their years of successful school teaching experience; their knowledge was based upon a stock of teaching skills that they had personally accumulated. There was, therefore, little distinction between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. Tutors’ teaching in college was strongly classroom orientated and experiential; they then closely supervised ‘their’ students in school, occasionally taking demonstration lessons themselves.

Overall, therefore, it would seem that teacher education in the 1950s retained many continuities with the nineteenth century. Practical training was still achieved through a master (or, more frequently, mistress) apprenticeship relationship while the college saw its role as giving strong moral leadership on the nature of teaching. What was different from the nineteenth century was that instead of being apprenticed to a practising teacher, students were now apprenticed to a tutor acting as an ‘expert teacher’ who was responsible for overseeing their whole training as well as their personal development. As we will see below, the content of training had also changed dramatically. The new morality of the colleges was more concerned with the promotion of childcentred, ‘progressive’ education, rather than Victorian humility and self-discipline. However, if anything, the fact that college and school-based teacher education worked in tandem meant that the opportunities for promoting this modem morality were even stronger than that hoped for by Kay-Shuttleworth himself. Such is the nature of the total institution.

A fundamental change to teacher education came with the Robbins Report of 1963. That report recommended that teacher education should be massively expanded (a threefold increase in numbers between 1960 and 1972) and relocated within the higher education system. The policy arguments deployed in favour of these changes had little to do with teacher education as such –students who were training to be teachers, it was argued, had as much right to a liberal education as any other student. The result was the introduction of the BEd degree, and the redesignation of Training Colleges as Colleges of Education. In Bell’s terms, this period signalled a transformation from ‘charismatic’ teacher education to education of the ‘cultivated man’ (or woman).

Both the organisation and curriculum of the new Colleges of Education were very different. The increased size, reduction in student and tutor residence and co-educational nature of the institutions meant that relationships were less personal. More significant from our point of view, the curriculum became more differentiated, academic and removed from the direct world of the school.

For example, existing approaches to educational theory were challenged by those in universities who were to validate the new degrees. As a consequence, new disciplinary specialists were recruited to replace generalist education tutors. These new lecturers – in sociology, psychology, philosophy and history – saw themselves as ‘equipping students for intelligent and informed discourse about educational issues, sharply distinguished from practical expertise’ (Bell 1981:13). And these moves were justified largely in terms of the liberal education of the students; studying the disciplines was conceived of as ‘part of the education of the scholar, who happened to want to be a teacher’ (Bell 1981:13). A similarly rigorous academic approach was progressively introduced to main subject departments which aimed to become ‘degree worthy’ in their own right. Teacher education throughout the 1960s and early 1970s therefore increasingly became an academic affair, with a growing distance between the world of the college and the school. The Colleges of Education saw themselves as having more in common with the universities and newly created Polytechnics than with the old Training Colleges.

But how were students prepared for work in school? Formally they were prepared through professional methods courses which, Bell suggests, became the home of many of the older lecturers from the Training College days and which retained a strong professional ideology. However, in most institutions, these courses now had a much lower status than the new academic courses and were seldom included in the formal assessment procedures of the degree. Moreover, given the number of students recruited, and the fact that the colleges were unwilling to cede any responsibility for supervising teaching practice to schools, all lecturers, whether they were experienced teachers or not, had to take on teaching practice supervision. Some students therefore found themselves supervised in school by lecturers with a wealth of practical experience on which to draw, others did not. In reality, therefore, students found that they largely had to fend for themselves, finding help where they might. For many students, trial and error and ad hoc socialisation were the main features of their professional preparation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the vocational commitments of many of the students, the academic nature of the BEd increasingly came under criticism.

A key turning point in the move away from the academic approach to teacher education was the James Report of 1972. Its recommendation that teacher education should be ‘unashamedly specialised and functional’ (p. 23) was to set the tone of much subsequent debate, and indeed its influence can still be felt twenty years on. Bell argues that it was complaints by students and teachers about the excessively academic nature of courses which eventually led to the James Inquiry. Whether or not this was its origin, the report certainly reflected this view, demanding ‘a more rationally explicit connection between academic knowledge and practical teaching skills’ (Bell 1981:17).

On the institutional front, the 1970s saw a period of rapid change with the contraction, amalgamation and closure of many colleges (Hencke 1977; Alexander et al. 1984). By the end of the decade, most Colleges of Education had gone and students on BEd degrees were studying in ‘poly-technic’ rather than ‘mono-technic’ institutions, often spending at least part of their time working alongside non-education students. The curriculum had changed too. The James Report had challenged the role of the educational disciplines of sociology, psychology, philosophy and history, except in so far as they could be seen as of practical use in contributing to the development of effective teaching...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Mentoring student teachers
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Practice makes perfect? The development of school-based teacher education in Britain
• 2 Learning to teach - the competency-based model
• 3 Learning to teach - the reflective practitioner model
• 4 The aims and methods of the project
• 5 Stages of student development
• 6 Learning for classroom management and control
• 7 Learning about ‘good ideas’ for teaching
• 8 Practical professional knowledge and student learning
• 9 Mentoring and the growth of professional knowledge
• References
• Index