Building Skills for Effective Primary Teaching

A guide to your school based training

Rachael Paige, Sue Lambert, Rebecca Geeson, Rachael Paige, Sue Lambert, Rebecca Geeson

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781529717204
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Elementary Education

This book supports primary trainees and their in school mentors to understand the complex nature of effective learning and teaching in primary schools. It explores the key skills required, helping trainees begin use them in their teaching, reflect on their development of these skills (with their mentors) and evaluate their impact on learning. This book supports and challenges primary trainee teachers and their mentors (both school based and university/SCITT based) by offering a range of approaches, strategies and perspectives to aspects of primary teaching. This new edition:

·Includes practical guidance for building resilience

·Explores the latest teaching approaches being trialled in schools

·Supports trainees to work with their in school mentor

· Includes new chapterss on professional identity and professional responsibilities

1 Becoming a reflective learner and teacher

Rebecca Geeson

This chapter will

• develop your understanding of reflection and reflexivity;
• consider how developing your ability to reflect will impact upon your practice;
• consider what to reflect upon, and what strategies you can use in order to reflect effectively;
• think about different approaches to reflection.

Links to the Teachers’ Standards

• 4 Plan and teach well structured lessons, specifically:
  • reflect systematically on the effectiveness of lessons and approaches to teaching.
• 8 Fulfil wider professional responsibilities, specifically:
  • develop effective professional relationships with colleagues, knowing how and when to draw on advice and specialist support;
  • take responsibility for improving teaching through appropriate professional development, responding to advice and feedback from colleagues.

Introduction

We have deliberately positioned the chapter on reflection at the start of this book, not because it is more important than aspects that are discussed in other chapters later on, but because the theme of reflection underpins everything in this book. Through the activities and discussions in each chapter, we encourage both trainees and mentors to engage in reflective practice, and consequently, develop your own effective practice as teachers and in your mentoring role.

Seminal authors

Donald Schön, one of the seminal writers on reflective practice, presents a very useful metaphor that helps us to think about what reflection is. In an ideal world, we would be able to position ourselves high on a hillside from which we could see a view before us of everything we need to know, and use this to create a map or plan of our professional lives. However, the reality is that we are down in the swampy lowlands (Schön, 1987) where we cannot see everything, and sometimes become stuck in the mud; we do not know everything, and we have to learn from the situations we encounter and the mistakes that we make as we go along. The way that Schön proposed that we develop a workable map of our professional worlds – one that we can use to navigate the unexpected road blocks or diversions that appear – is through reflection.

Schön’s work (1983) centred on his distinction between reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action. Reflection-in-action is the process that you undertake with very little time and fairly immediately as and when you need to act in any situation. You will make use of your own previous knowledge and your understanding of theory as you decide how to act. Reflection-on-action is the reflective process that occurs after the event, usually once you have a little time and space to think through things.

Understanding these two ideas is central to the argument for developing reflective practice in teachers. Beaty (1997) guards us against becoming the teacher who has 20 years of experience, which is actually only one year of experience repeated 20 times over. If you simply respond to situations without engaging in reflection, you may apply the same action in a future situation. This may be the most appropriate action and will not necessarily be a negative response to a situation, but how will you know that the situation could not have been resolved in a different, and possibly better, way if you have not considered it in more depth? If you reflect-on-action, you will have the opportunity to consider alternatives, relate your actions to theory and, crucially, in doing so, develop a greater ‘bank’ of knowledge and theory upon which to draw next time you are reflecting-in-action.

It is important to point out here the mentor’s key role in encouraging and developing reflective practice. Often, the mentor may be the one who initially points out aspects of practice that deserve further reflection, and can support and encourage the trainee in making links to theory and applying their learning to their future professional development (Argyris and Schön, 1974). Discussion with somebody else can be a beneficial part of reflection; trainees value the opportunity to talk about their experiences so that they can consider others’ perspectives and appreciate having someone to encourage them to interpret and justify their ideas in order to make sense of them (Bain et al., 1999).

Schön’s work built on that of John Dewey, and this work can also help us to understand benefits of reflective practice. Dewey (1933, 1938) believed that the learner should be an active participant in learning, making their own sense of the world with encouragement from teachers who should foster an experimental approach to learning in their classrooms.

Reflection and discussion activity

Reflection

Trainee: having considered Schön’s ideas (1987) about reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action, think back to an event or situation that has occurred in the classroom recently. It could be how you responded to low-level disruption in the classroom, the resources you found to support a particular pupil during an English lesson or how you arranged groups in PE. It does not necessarily have to be something that you thought went badly. However, it should be a situation at which your mentor was present and also witnessed.

1. Briefly, letting your mentor know what you are planning to write about, note down what happened and what you did.
2. Write down what knowledge and theory you think you had about this beforehand. What do you think made you make your decisions?

Mentor: think about the situation or event that your trainee has id...