Teacher Education Policy

Some Issues Arising From Research And Practice

Rob McBride

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135717865
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

To improve schools we need to improve teachers. This volume provides recent research evidence that suggests that current education policy is not Promoting Effective Teacher Education And That Teacher Education Policy has: failed to support the formation of professional partnerships in initial teacher education; has almost ignored the induction of newly qualified teachers; and has narrowed in-service education into support for the implementation of central policy.; The evidence gathered in this book is used to argue for new forms of teacher education in every phase, built upon the foundation of professional partnership between schools and institutions of higher education. It is suggested that the funding for such changes could be drawn from less effective forms of school improvement, such as National Curriculum development and school inspection. With the implementation of such changes, it is argued, good quality teacher education programmes would prosper and foster a broad concensus about educational development that is often absent.

1
Introduction: The Issues Facing Teacher Education Policy

Rob McBride

For the Annual Conference of the British Education Research Association (BERA) in September 1993 I called for papers on the broad topic of teacher education policy. At that time I was coordinator of a group dealing with this subject. I was overwhelmed by academics wishing to give papers and we ended up with two symposia and in excess of twenty presentations. Most of the papers contained in this volume emerged from these symposia.

The major debating points are covered by the papers contained here but other pertinent questions are raised. In particular, while the main contents refer to the system of education in England and Wales¹, there are two papers which relate to different contexts. Chapter 4 reports on the Scottish system which, while not far away, is still sufficiently different to give a contrast. Chapter 10 is written by Hans Vonk from the Netherlands who has considerable experience of researching the mentoring of beginning teachers (i.e., Newly Qualified Teachers or NQTs) in that country, as well as in several others.

All of the papers emanate from research or research-based practice. Research and researched development could, and should influence educational practice to a far greater degree than they do at present. The chapters in this volume do not just reflect the whims of a few detached people. Researchers, and in this case mostly experienced researchers, have gathered data, processed data, analysed the data, tested their conclusions in other contexts, listened to other researchers, given talks and noted responses and reflected on the relevant literature. That is not to say that anything written here is beyond criticism but research-based evidence should not be rejected casually. Those politicians who seemingly change policy and attempt to influence practice at the drop of a hat really ought to pay more attention to research.

The book is divided into four sections. If teacher education should be a nearly seamless whole from cradle to grave the division of the various chapters of the book into sections is somewhat contrived. Yet writers have tended to focus on a single phase of teacher education and I have grouped the chapters accordingly. Part 1 is broadly concerned with initial or pre-service teacher education; Part 2 deals with the induction of NQTs, covering roughly the first five years of teaching; Part 3 covers in-service education which spans the rest of a teacher’s career. The last section includes two chapters which consider central principles and the final chapter is a summary which is built upon the arguments from all of the other chapters.

The central aim of this introductory chapter is to articulate questions and issues which the subsequent chapters have addressed. Some chapters will argue in favour of a particular view and even suggest solutions to problems raised. Others will tend to make the questions they outline more complex and not suggest any changes in policy. I take it as my responsibility as editor to bring together all of the arguments presented and to broadly rough out what a teacher education policy could look like. This is my task for Chapter 20 which will map out the issues contained in the whole book.

In Chapter 2 Chris Husbands provides a history of recent changes in Initial Teacher Education (ITE) policy and goes on to describe the resultant action in one school of education in this context. Policy has dictated, largely through its control of funding for ITE, that schools now play a greater part in the design and delivery of ITE while Higher Education (HE) has a reduced role. We might ask whether the new system is producing better teachers and how the partnership between schools and HE, as demanded by the policy, is working.

Control of funding has been a powerful weapon for the current government in ensuring that policy influences practice. Yet that power will always be limited by the ‘slippage’ that separates policy and practice. Chapter 3 reports a survey carried out by the MOTE (Modes of Teacher Education) project of teacher training institutions engaged in ITE and concentrates particularly on an area not completely governed by funding, the notion of partnership between schools and HE. This chapter looks at the power relations between HE and schools and asks whether the partnership notion, as defined by the policy, is suited to students or not.

While Chapter 3 gives a broad view of the implementation of the English and Welsh system, Chapter 4, by describing the Scots system, enables us to ask whether the innovations described in the previous chapters are desirable at all. Sally Brown asks whether the Scots, who continue to deliver ITE through an HE-led system, are clinging to an outdated approach or resisting, with a higher moral purpose, the market-led turmoil she sees south of the border. Should the English system have been changed quickly and radically, or should it have evolved from the kinds of partnership which already exist?

Anne Edwards and Jill Collison, in Chapter 5, consider two cases of partnership between HE and schools. In Chapter 2 Husbands was fairly positive about the partnerships he was engaged in but Edwards and Collison do not see major changes or ‘metanoia’ in the support for the learning of pre-service teachers, as distinct from the changes in organization and management. Are the changes merely organizational? Are we producing better prepared teachers?

But are partnerships between institutions, such as schools and HE, sufficient to bring about better provision? Should we rather work on the partnerships between people who work in them? Chapter 6, the next contribution, from Colin Biott and John Spindler, considers partnerships between established practitioners and pre-service teachers during school placements. Neville Bennett takes looks further into these partnerships in Chapter 7 by focusing on the development of pedagogical reasoning. We can go on to ask if there is enough time during the PGCE (Post Graduate Certificate in Education) year to provide pre-service teachers with the expertise they need to become teachers? Is it enough to consider ITE separately from induction and in-service training? Should we have a longer-term view?

David Clemson ends Part 1 by pursuing a more fundamental issue. Recalling Stenhouse’s dictum that good teacher induction issues creatively different individual teachers, Clemson questions whether the broader context of education is dominated by the ideology of a minority group. Are there as many forms of ITE as there are learners? Are radical changes needed? Similar questions will be asked by John Schostak in Chapter 19.

Until 1992 teachers were required to complete a probationary year. Susan Sidgwick opens Part 2 by considering how teachers are inducted without the protection of that measure. Schools now have delegated budgets and the needs of NQTs can be seen as a cost to the school. Are schools ensuring that NQTs have lighter teaching loads? Are they paying for adequate mentoring? If ITE is too short to prepare teachers completely should induction be more, rather than less, important? Who is taking overall responsibility for induction and who should? Will the ‘market’ take care of induction?

Chapter 10 is written by Hans Vonk of The Free University of Amsterdam. I first met Hans Vonk at the National University of Lesotho where he was conducting a programme in the mentoring of NQTs. He has plainly been researching this area for many years and his chapter provides a broad coverage of the whole field at a time when the notion of mentoring both pre-service teachers and NQTs are major talking points in the English system. Vonk’s work prompts many questions such as: Are NQTs developing or merely surviving? Are mentors properly educated? Should the mentor also assess the NQT? These, and others he outlines, are pertinent to the English context.

Still on the topic of induction, Les Tickle asks how can we assist NQTs to become reflective practitioners whose practical judgment has been developed? His research demonstrates that there is a tendency for NQTs to value survival in the classroom rather than reflection. Is the current trend towards policies which value observable technical skills restricting reflective activity to mere technical matters (such as ensuring that equipment is available).

Part 3 opens with a chapter by Eileen Francis which describes her own involvement in Inset since 1981. Her experiences give something of the flavour of the changes that have occurred over that period. In particular she raises a theme which runs through almost this entire section, namely, the centrality of personal learning in professional development. Yet Francis observes the difference in approach to Inset between these professional developers, who concentrate on the thought processes of practitioners, and the managers of Inset systems who work with structures. If there are these two groups, and if the latter control funding will they pay for personal learning (as opposed to say, Inset support for delivery of the national curriculum)?

In Chapter 13 Jack Whitehead contrasts raising educational standards through creating a market for schools, to Inset. HE has in mind Inset which raises with teachers educational questions of the form ‘How do I improve my practice?’ Jack also suggests that institutions of HE are essential to Inset provision. Christine O’Hanlon, in Chapter 14, usefully defines a number of terms in her chapter on action research and professional development. The idea of the involvement of HE in professional development is discussed here. Other issues examined are whether Inset should be lifelong and how personal change relates to institutional change.

Chapter 15, by Chris Day, pursues the same ideas as Jack Whitehead and Christine O’Hanlon with respect to role of HE in Inset; the importance of personal to professional development; and the length of time needed for good teacher education. Yet Chris Day reports on a particular developmental project, giving a considerable number of examples of the materials he has used. He reports too, on the evaluation of the project by teachers. A different project is the topic of Chapter 16 by David Frost. The principles he works by are broadly the same as those used in the previous chapters on Inset but he explores the Inset relationship between HE and schools differently. Like Day, Frost describes a developmental project he is engaged in.

The final chapter in this section discusses my own role as a provider of Inset. If HE is to be a major player in the provision of Inset and if the market remains the means of connecting ‘purchasers’ and ‘providers’, how does the practice of Inset appear to staff in HE? Can HE institutions provide good quality educational support, especially Inset, when they are at the ‘end of the line’, dependent upon the vagaries of school budgets and national policies?

Part 4 contains two chapters which consider broader notions of teacher education as well as my summary of the other chapters. In Chapter 18 David Bridges looks at the weaknesses of school-based teacher education of all types. Is it sufficient to say that it ‘works’? Approaches which can be described as pragmatic may not ask the best questions and may not be sufficiently self-critical to find the best solutions. The antidote to pragmatism is critical debate with people from different standpoints which makes problematic what is taken for granted. We might ask where, and with whom, this debate might take place?

John Schostak, in the penultimate chapter, raises the issue of a radical reappraisal of education policy and practice. What are educational ideas and how could they lead to a teacher-education policy? Should we start again with a completely new conception? We might ask whether any government would be prepared to start again with a clean policy sheet. While David Bridges has focused on the need to look outside the body of practitioners, John Schostak contrasts that with the need to look within the practice of teachers. I am sure that both would agree that there is a need for parity of relationship between those who do the work and those who can enrich it through criticism. The reader may ask where the balances are to be struck and how policy might contribute to a way forward.

Note

1 I will occasionally use the term the ‘English’ system when I mean ‘English and Welsh’ This is in the interest of brevity and no disrespect is meant to Welsh readers.

Part 1
Initial Teacher Education

2
Change Management in Initial Teacher Education: National Contexts, Local Circumstance and the Dynamics of Change

Chris Husbands

Solutions must come through the development of shared meaning. The interface between individual and collective meaning and action in everyday life is where change stands or falls. (Fullan, 1991, p. 5)

Introduction

Whereas we have a vast literature on the philosophical and pedagogical underpinning of initial teacher education, and on the respective contributions of schools and higher education to the professional learning of new teachers (e.g., Furlong et al., 1988, Booth, Furlong and Wilkin, 1990), we have relatively few accounts of the management of change in initial teacher education. This is a curious lacuna, not least since the last decade has engendered a considerable literature on the management of change and the process of change in the schools to which the ‘products’ of teacher education proceed. Wilkin observes that ‘it is a relatively simple matter to devise and justify theoretical schemes. Putting them into operation is altogether different’ (Wilkin, 1991, p. 8); similarly, Fullan argues that ‘educational change is technically simple and socially complex’ (1991, p. 47). This paper is a contribution to understanding the nature and process of change in teacher education. Its central theme is the development of a school-based model of teacher education in the context of the one-year Secondary Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) at the University of East Anglia between 1991 and 1994. In describing the background to, assumptions of, and development of, the change process, I draw upon themes relating to the theory of change, notably meanings of change and the attitudes of participants to the nature of change as well as on historical and contextual factors related to the School of Education at UEA and its relationships with East Anglian schools. It is based largely on an analysis of the change process in a single institution, set in and then related to wider policy and theoretical concerns in teacher education. The change process at the centre of the paper was, and remains, complex for a number of interrelated reasons. The first is the location of change at the intersection of political initiatives, educational research perspectives and a period of multiple, discontinuous change all of which called for a range of reactions and assumptions. The second is to do with the multiplicity of actors, personal and institutional perspectives involved in a teacher-education programme involving a complex University School of Education and something in excess of forty secondary comprehensive schools in a large rural area where lines of ‘management communication’ were of necessity frequently weak. As we shall see, there were different understandings of the central concepts of ‘school-based’ teacher education and different levels of commitment to, and responsibility for, the process of change. The third complexity derives from the interrelation in the process of change of different financial and educational assumptions in schools, the university and local authorities.

At the centre of the narrative explored in this paper is a political initiative to reshape initial teacher education: the initiative launched by the Conservative Secretary of State for Education, Kenneth Clarke in 1992 (Clarke, 1992, and developed in DFE, 1992). Clarke’s agenda was dominated by the proposal to transfer substantial elements of responsibility for initial teacher education from higher education to schools. As we shall see, however, the local dynamics of change in initial teacher education were only partially framed by the poli...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• 1. Introduction: The Issues Facing Teacher Education Policy
• Part 1: Initial Teacher Education
• Part 2: The Induction of Newly Qualified Teachers
• Part 3: In-Service Education
• Part 4: Broader Considerations and Summary
• Notes On Contributors