Student Teachers in School Practice

An Analysis of Learning Opportunities

A. Douglas

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137268679
• eBook ISBN: 9781137268686
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

This book discusses changes to student teacher education globally and in the UK, exploring howstudent teachers learn through school teaching practices andideas for developing and maximizing learning opportunities in school-based student teacher education.

1

Introduction

This book considers the learning opportunities for student teachers when they are on school teaching practice. These opportunities are discussed in relation to the changes in student teacher education in the UK and globally. In England, there are increasingly centralised requirements for teacher education partnerships between schools and providers of student teacher education. The changes in teacher education have placed and continue to place schools in a more prominent and influential role with regard to student teacher learning. Research in teacher education highlights the importance of schools in the student teacher learning process and the difficulties inherent in enabling learning opportunities for practitioners and student teachers in the classroom (Edwards et al., 2002). Believing in the need for research evidence to inform practice (Douglas, 2012), the book derives from extensive observations of and interviews with practitioners involved in teacher education. My general approach to the text comes from the need to increase understanding of not only the definition of student teacher learning but how key ideas within the concept are applied to learning opportunities in schools and school subject departments. The book develops and analyses the substantive issue of learning opportunities for student teachers in their teaching practice as well as explores the benefits of a rich ethnographic research process.

Making comparisons in teacher education internationally is difficult as there is little ‘consensus on the skills and qualities required to be a teacher’ (Sayer, 2009, p. 159). How these skills and qualities can be learnt therefore is very much open to debate:

There are few certainties in [student] teacher education. Perhaps one of them is that student teachers need to have experience of teaching in a school. (McNally et al., 1997, p. 485)

McNally et al.’s study which investigates the support received by student teachers in their school practice concludes by identifying ‘a need for greater conceptual and semantic clarity in understanding and describing the school experience’ (ibid. 497). Traditionally, school practice has been seen as an expectation ‘to provide a place for student teachers to practise teaching [and] to try out the practices provided by the university’ (Zeichner, 2010, p. 90). Often referred to as field experiences or school practicum, calls have grown in the research literature for a greater integration of the different aspects of teacher education courses by tackling the divide between course content taught in the higher education institution and the practical experience of working in schools (Grossman et al., 2009, Cochran-Smith et al., 2012). Research in school practice has been recognised as playing a determinant role in student teacher education (Caires et al., 2012) as well as in early teacher development (Britzman, 2003, Evelein, Korthagen and Brekelmans, 2008). A review of 54 research articles published between 1990 and 2010 on how school teaching practice contributes to student teacher development in relation to urban contexts highlights the need for research to focus on the situated and mediated nature of student teachers’ learning in the field, and criticises previous research as having ‘a lack of focus on what pre-service teachers actually learn from such experiences and how’ (Anderson and Stillman, 2012, p. 2). It is the importance of the school settings and the learning opportunities they afford student teachers which are the focus of this book. The influence of the higher education institution is seen in the visits of the university tutors to the schools.

My background in education

For twelve years I worked as a teacher and senior manager in four secondary schools. In the year 2000 I became a high school deputy head teacher. After eight years of teaching in the classroom my new leadership role involved working with teaching staff from all subject departments. During my four years in senior school management I had responsibilities for staff development and teaching and learning. I developed an awareness of how school subject department environments differ with regard to their ways of working. As a member of the senior team my weekly timetable comprised regular ‘on call’ lessons. With the benefit of a two-way radio I could be instantly summoned to classrooms in order to respond to requests of teaching staff. This often involved intervening in lessons where a senior teacher’s presence was considered necessary or appropriate. Such incidents usually arose from situations where pupils refused to follow instructions. After behaving unacceptably pupils sometimes absented themselves from the classroom and on occasions from the school, disappearing over the school fence into the neighbouring housing estate. Although mainly focusing on the negative aspects of classroom teaching my ‘on call’ sessions illustrated for me the differences in classroom learning environments. Variations were evident in behaviour management strategies and in pupil and staff expectations when engaged in teaching and learning. Such variations often reflected the differences in the subject department environments in the school.

Prior to my senior management role I gained an appreciation of the importance of subject department learning environments in relation to my responsibilities in teacher education. In the 1990s I co-ordinated teacher education activities with student teachers. Three universities had agreements with the school in relation to student teachers’ school practice. The student teachers visited the school at various stages in their training. The universities ran different teacher education courses, and I became familiar with the specific requirements of the teacher education partnerships between the universities and the school. At this time the nature of partnership between schools and higher education institutions in England was realised relatively independently of government directives, which primarily dictated the amount of time to be spent in schools and the number of school practices. My work in student teacher education started to coincide with major reforms to secondary student teacher training announced by the Department of Education (DfE, 1992). These led to a large shift in policy with student teacher education courses in England and Wales becoming school-based by 1994 (Whitty, 2002). Consequently, my career in schools and working with student teachers grew alongside fairly substantial changes made to teacher education.

Partnership in teacher education

The different interpretations of partnership in student teacher education possibly indicated the different understandings of the nature of teaching and of the relative expertise of teachers and university staff in discussing matters of pedagogy within student teacher education courses. Attempts centrally to make teacher education more consistent post-1992 meant that the broad structure of teacher education courses (the most popular in England being the one-year full-time Postgraduate Certificate of Education, PGCE) shared overall characteristics in different education institutions, and were seen as having distinctive features. Partnership arrangements suggested that some joint responsibility was given to the school and the university for planning and managing courses. This included the assessment of student teachers. The regulations (Teaching Agency, 2012) stipulate that 24 weeks out of the 36-week Postgraduate Certificate of Education course are to be based in schools for student teachers. A minimum of two schools are used. The structure of the school experience requires a specifically designated school-supervising teacher (often known as a mentor) who arranges and co-ordinates the teaching practice in the subject department with the higher education institution.

In this way:

The partnership (is) characterised by an intention that university teacher educators and mentors work together to enable students as they progress through the programme to analyse and reflect upon their school experience. (Taylor, 2008, p. 70)

The view here is premised on an idea that there is a shared understanding of how student teachers learn to teach. However, the way teacher education partnerships have been seen to operate differently suggests that this idea is unfounded (Furlong, 2000). Although government policy appears to encourage a consistent approach to student teacher education, the similar features of the student teacher education courses belie the contested purpose of student teacher education work. Indeed, I had noted variations between course objectives in my earlier co-ordinating role with three university teacher education courses.

‘Worldwide, many teacher education programs state that they have changed toward a more practice-based curriculum’ (Lunenberg and Korthagen, 2009, p. 229). Alongside this have been calls for a greater amount of time that student teachers should spend in schools (see, for example, Ure, 2010, for developments in Australia). A continuing shift to school-based learning in teacher education courses and in many other routes into teaching in England (15% of all new recruits to teaching enter through either an employment-based system or a school-centred programme (House of Commons Report, 2010)) promotes the capabilities of schools to work with unqualified teachers. Innovations with regard to different types of higher education input and subsequently different ways that schools should work with student teachers have continued with numerous policy initiatives (Whitty, 2002, p. 73). Government papers further emphasise the role of the school in teacher education in England (DfE, 2010a and b, 2011). New partnerships between schools and universities give greater onus to schools to approach universities for the education needs required for newly recruited student teachers. This has meant that funding for teacher education is being opened up, with new opportunities for the responsibility of training increasingly located within the school rather than the higher education institution. A move away from higher education input in student teacher education has also been noted in the USA where ‘increasingly, school districts are taking over the task of preparing teachers for their schools’ (Grossman, 2008, p. 11).

Teacher education policy

How student teacher education is shaped is often strongly influenced by ideological positions about the nature of schooling and teaching. Governments around the world frequently aim to remove the influence of certain interests in favour of their own (Menter et al., 2006). Research into teacher education policy in the USA indicates that ‘policy (and policy proposals) [are] unavoidably political, and that policy making involves contentious debate as well as complicated political maneuvering and strategies’ (Cochran Smith et al., 2013, p. 6). Driving teacher education policy in many countries ‘has been the growing significance of globalization’ (Furlong, 2013, p. 28) and the consequent belief in neoliberal policies. In England, national politics greatly influences teacher education policy, which has been dependent on different governments’ interpretations of neoliberalism. In Asia too, the impact of the policy and practices in teacher education are seen to be shaped by ‘global forces underpinned by an overriding economically-driven ideology’ (Tang, 2011, p. 113). In many European and North American settings teacher education policy has also been affected more by the need to recruit teachers than by longer term planning and thinking (Menter et al., 2006, p. 2). Most schools in England have preferred working with higher education in a partnership model of training (Barker, 1996) with only a few wanting complete responsibility. A concern of teacher education when considered as a problem of policy is that the contexts and cultures of schools and how these ‘support or constrain teachers’ abilities to use knowledge and resources’ are not the focus (Cochran-Smith, 2006, p. 139). Instead, this is replaced with discussions on training and testing ‘to ensure that all teachers have basic subject matter knowledge and the technical skills to bring pupils’ test scores to minimum thresholds’ (ibid. 140). Such an apparently rational and commonsense approach ignores the complexity of the many problems related to teacher education and fails to take account of the settings where learning happens.

The central research study in this book focuses on school settings and presents four secondary school subject departments working with student teachers during their school practice. This research was a year-long ethnographic study and explored teacher education work with fifteen student teachers in the subject departments of Geography, History, Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) and Science. The departments are in one secondary school (for 11- to 18-year-old pupils) in the south of England. The research focused on a one-year Postgraduate Certificate of Education programme at a university in England. The course has consistently been rated as highly successful in the national inspection grade system and course evaluation outcomes. The school in which the student teachers were placed was well regarded for the way its staff worked with the university, and had many connections with the work of the university’s teacher education course, with which it had been involved for over fifteen years. Two questions guided my research: first, what were the opportunities for student teacher learning as constructed in the different departments in one school? And second, if not the same, to what extent and why were these learning opportunities constructed differently?

The methodological focus

Ethnographic research

In wanting to appreciate student teachers’ learning opportunities in school departments, I believed it was necessary to spend a considerable amount of time in these departments observing and talking to the staff and student teachers working there. During the school year I made 80 visits to the research school in order to appreciate the learning opportunities afforded. Working in an ethnographic way seemed appropriate for such a study. A distinctive feature of ethnography revolves around an appreciation of the ‘need to understand the particular cultural worlds in which people live’ (Goldbart and Hustler, 2000, p. 16). In this research, transcripts of interviews were considered alongside observation field notes and documentation when analysing the learning opportunities for student teachers in the school subject departments. Data were generated separately and at different times with my perspective as an interviewer, observer and document analyser deciding on data selection and reduction.

The research comes from a sociocultural perspective in that it regards the participants as people in context (Cole, 1996). In this research the context is the school and the subject department in which the student teachers are working. These contexts are distinct from one another in the way participants interact ‘within a network of individual and collective histories and cultural expectations’ (Kozleski, 2011, p. 253). It is in the interaction of the cultural histories that teachers and student teachers bring with them to the department coupled with the institutional cultures of schooling that the department cultures are constructed. The resulting negotiated cultures of the departments, through their patterns and rituals, afford and constrain learning for the participants.

Research on school subject departments (discussed in Chapter 2) highlights the complexity of their make-up as learning environments. Student teachers’ school practice in secondary high schools is centred on teaching in specialist subject areas with subject teachers and the support of a subject specialist mentor and university tutor. The variety of opinions evident on all matters of education and differences in possible working styles suggest that there may be considerable variation in how departments operate. Factors such as beliefs about the school subject and opinions on teaching and learning may influence the work. Such factors inform the first research question which considered the learning opportunities for student teachers. The second research question asked why student teacher learning opportunities were different and sought to explore the reasons behind why teacher education activity differed in school subject departments. A theoretical and analytic framework was needed to address such complexity in order to help me consider the learning opportunities for student teachers.

The theoretical framework

The use of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) has dramatically increased in educational research over the last two decades (Nussbaumer, 2012). The theory is an approach to analysing contexts for learning, where the culture of the context is revealed in how people think and act. It draws on Vygotsky’s concept of mediation, in which human action is seen to be mediated by what he called tools. Tools mediate the interaction of individuals with their environment (Vygotsky, 1986). By analysing tools (their choice and use) it is possible to get an understanding of what is considered important in an activity, as tools indicate how one interprets and tackles a task, for example, in the way a school mentor might use a lesson planning framework as a tool in a conversation with a student teacher. The CHAT concepts (object, subject, tool and activity system) which are discussed in Chapter 3 describe the cultural historical psychology that guides this research on the complex settings of school departments. They show how it is possible to ‘ground analysis in the culturally organised activities of everyday life’ (Cole, 1996, p. 5). A CHAT methodology focuses on questioning why the school learning environment is like it is and how practices have evolved over time and in relation to other practices. It therefore analyses the social situation of (student teacher) development, which in this research is seen in the major influence of the school subject departments.

I draw on Engeström’s (1999a) concept of the activity system in order to study how teacher teams in student teacher education operate as cultural systems which afford particular ways for student teachers to be learners. The analytic focus is on the participants (subjects) in the system, the relationships between them and the purposes and values in the work practices. The subjects, their interactions and the cultural system are in ‘a constant mutually shaping dialectic’ (Edwards, 2011), and it is this dialectical relationship between mind and culture that makes CHAT distinctive as an analytic framework. In considering how the use of tools differs between school men...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Researching Workplace Learning
• 3 Cultural and Historical Activity Theory: Identifying the Object of Student Teacher Education Activity
• 4 The Methodological Implications of Working Ethnographically
• 5 The School History Department: Cultural, Historical and Social Practices in Student Teacher Education
• 6 The School Modern Foreign Languages Department: Cultural, Historical and Social Practices in Student Teacher Education
• 7 The School Geography Department: Cultural, Historical and Social Practices in Student Teacher Education
• 8 The School Science Department: Cultural, Historical and Social Practices in Student Teacher Education
• 9 An Analysis of Student Teacher Education Tools: Mediating Student Teacher Education Practice
• 10 The Objects of Student Teacher Education Activity
• 11 Developing Expert Learners of Teaching and Learning: A Model for Researching and Developing Learning Opportunities in School Settings
• 12 Conclusions, Implications and Recommendations
• References
• Index