Successful Teaching 14-19

Theory, Practice and Reflection

Warren Kidd, Gerry Czerniawski

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781446245279
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation secondaire

Are you looking for a complete training manual, to get you through your assignments, help you on your teaching practice and support you in your first teaching job?

For trainee teachers studying to teach the 14 to 19 age group in secondary schools and colleges, this book is a practical guide covering the essential skills that must be acquired in order to successfully complete your course.

Five sections cover education policy, professional skills, theory, practice and reflection. The authors provide teaching ideas that work, and that will help trainee teachers to improve their grades and lesson observation profiles. There is a clear explanation of the theoretical underpinning that must be grasped in order to pass written assignments, and Masters level debates are addressed throughout the book, with a dedicated chapter exploring academic themes and issues.

The book is packed with ideas for classroom activities, and popular topics covered include:

- essential educational theory

- behaviour and classroom management

- how to start off lessons

- ideas for group work

- setting homework

- evaluating your own practice, and understanding how you can improve

- revising for exams

- working as part of a team

- using technology

All the chapters contain learning objectives, discussion points, examples from practice, Masters level extensions (for those studying at that level) and suggestions for further reading.

Suitable for all those studying to teach the 14 to 19 age range, this book is ideal for those on Secondary PGCE, PGDE and GTP courses leading to QTS, those studying for the post-compulsory sector PTLLS, DTLLS and CTLLS qualifications and those doing Overseas Teacher Training and Teach First courses.

Warren Kidd and Gerry Czerniawski are former teachers with experience of working in diverse settings; they are both Senior Lecturers in the Cass School of Education, University of East London.

SECTION 1

EDUCATIONAL POLICY

CHAPTER 1

WHY TEACH?

Objectives

By the end of this chapter the reader will be able to:

1. understand some of the key debates in forming a professional teacher identity;
2. recognise the importance of educational theory to better understand classroom practice;
3. understand the meaning of the term ‘reflective practitioner’;
4. see the importance of the interconnection of theory, practice and reflection for developing effective teaching skills;
5. recognise some important educational research on the nature of effective teaching.

Training to be a teacher

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Learning to teach is both rewarding and challenging. In fact, the reward is intensified by the challenging nature of the role and of the profession. For a number of years now, teacher education has spoken of the importance of being a ‘reflective practitioner’ as an essential part of adopting a professional teaching role. As we shall also see, notions of ‘professionalism’ are very important for the trainee teacher as s/he starts out. In one’s attempt to be a ‘good’ or an ‘effective’ teacher we look briefly here at the forces that shape and affect teachers and teaching, and we look at the rewards of the role. We would like to paint a picture of teaching as a complex social encounter, buttressed by wider social forces and yet, at the same time, a reflective process making teachers as much learners as those they teach.

Teacher training, or to use its other term, initial teacher education, is a tricky process to try and pin down. It is not one thing, but an interesting mixture of many different skills, disciplines and experiences. This tells you something very significant about what it means to be a teacher. On your course and through this book you will be introduced to a wide range of ideas, tools, techniques and tips drawing from a wide range of disciplines: politics, sociology, psychology and education studies itself. Teacher education is academic, and yet also practical. Teaching is as much to do with the physical activity of managing a class as it is the creative endeavour of preparing good quality resources. The teaching experience is also based upon developing an extensive and effective range of emotional and interpersonal skills; what we call the ‘affective’ domain of learning.

Perhaps more importantly, this is the time to fully immerse yourself in the possibilities and options that are available to you as a new teacher. It is a time for mistakes, experimentation and reflection. It is a time to build a solid base upon which to establish your future professional role.

Breaking through all the misunderstanding

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It is almost impossible to get away from ‘education, education, education’ in our modern society. It is the source of frequent news items; almost constant and continuous media debate, ‘spin’ and policy-making. Every few years the government of the time announces the next great educational reform. Every summer the media lays siege to examination boards in an attempt to establish once and for all, are qualifications getting easier or not? It is equally impossible not to meet someone who has an opinion about education, or at least, in a more narrow sense, an opinion about schooling and teachers and teaching. We have all been to school – we all have experiences (good and bad). That makes us all an expert in our own way.

And yet, nothing could be further from the truth. So much is spoken about teachers and teaching, so much media attention is seemingly given to the profession, and yet most of us as adults are completely unaware of what schools, colleges and teaching are really like. Schools and colleges are still closed worlds. It would be a mistake to base our impressions on education on either our own limited experiences as a learner or on media-saturated accounts of moral panics and partial viewpoints.

‘Everyone remembers a good teacher’

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From the start we need to be clear that it is essential to separate ourselves as a learner or, at least, how we might (mis)remember learning, from ourselves as a professional teacher-in-the-making. Learning to teach is a strange mixture of many different skills and types of knowledge – it is practical, theoretical and reflective. Learning to teach means we need to juggle our own experiences and observations with the evidence we see in front of us. We need to use educational theories and research as a lens through which to help us focus our attention on what we are doing, why we are doing it, and whether or not it is working.

Sometimes teaching is highly pragmatic – things just seem to work. On other occasions, theory and research can be used to point you in useful directions; to shape and mould your practice in some specific way. Teaching is both a craft and an intellectual endeavour. It is practical, physical and changes over time, and yet, at the same time, to teach well requires not just an understanding of current educational theory but an awareness of how these theories aid and shape the practical ‘hands-on’ work that we do with learners in classrooms and other learning environments. We call this ‘evidence-based practice’; practically observed outcomes of your own teaching understood through the lens of theory and models. To teach well, you will need to become part craftsperson, part pragmatist and opportunist, and part sociologist, psychologist and actor!

Teaching is an immensely rich and rewarding profession. It is also very hard to communicate to trainee teachers at the start of their professional formation just how rewarding, exciting, challenging, tiring and life-changing the profession can be. As the adverts claim, ‘everyone remembers a good teacher’. This is certainly true, and one of the greatest rewards of the profession. What is not so clear-cut, however, is just what it is that makes a ‘good teacher’ ‘good’.

What is a ‘good teacher’?

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Some teachers are ‘good’ because the support they offer learners makes them feel able and comfortable to learn and take risks learning where otherwise they might not; some good teachers inspire through the force of their personality, offering a charismatic persona for learners to respond to in an excited and interested way; some good teachers ‘simply’ put in the hours, time and effort to ensure that all their learners are as well equipped as possible to meet the challenges of examinations, growing up, the world of work and constant change. We hope through your journey as a trainee teacher you come to know the experience of being a good teacher, and in your changing professional identity and role, that you come to know the new you a little better. You can be sure of one thing – the experience of teacher training will change you as much as your teaching will change the lives of those you support in the classroom.

In many respects, the whole of this book is about becoming a ‘good teacher’. Earlier we have noted that good teachers unify theory, practice and reflection. They link these essential elements together in order to identify what works and to know why it does.

Ruddock (1985) warns us against slipping into comfortable ‘habit’. She argues that good teaching is experimental. If we allow our practice to slip into habit – to become unthinking and uncritical – we are in danger of losing sight of why something works; we are then a very short step away from being unable to identify the need for change, ever teaching in the same pattern and routine, separated from understanding the needs of our learners. Ruddock describes this process as a ‘hegemony of habit’ – we allow our teaching to become taken for granted. It becomes cemented into habit and eventually we are unable to break free.

Learners themselves are as much aware of good teaching as we are, sometimes more so. Consider these descriptions of a ‘good teacher’ by eight-year-old learners:

A good teacher … is kind, is generous, listens to you, encourages you, has faith in you, keeps confidence, likes teaching children, likes teaching their subject, takes time to explain things, helps you when you’re stuck, tells you how you are doing, allows you to have your say, doesn’t give up on you, cares for your opinion, makes you feel clever, treats people equally, stands up for you, makes allowances, tells the truth, is forgiving. (Hay McBer, 2000: 2)

It is difficult to disagree with the importance of these sentiments. What is interesting, however, is that this collection of statements can be broken down into three subsections.

• Good teaching is emotionally supportive of learners and based upon successful interpersonal skills and relationships.
• Good teaching is based upon your clarity as an effective communicator and in how you engage with learners.
• Good teaching is expressed through your enjoyment and pleasure of the support of the learning of others.

At times you will find learning to teach hard. Maybe even harder than you once found learning to learn.

When you start to access the research literature, and for your reading of the rest of this book, you will quickly come across two very important terms.

The first is ‘teaching and learning’. A mouthful to keep saying, but it is important to be sensitive to the fact that by saying teaching and learning we are making an important statement – that teaching cannot exist without learning having taken place. This is simply the only measurement of ‘good teaching’ that it is possible to have. This simple observation has massive implications for what we do and how we judge ourselves.

The second key term is pedagogy. The term ‘pedagogy’ is of great importance for the rest of this book and for the rest of your professional life. By pedagogy we mean thinking and theorising about how learners learn, with a view that this then shapes the teaching and learning strategies, tools and techniques we adopt. Strictly speaking, pedagogy means the study of how children learn, with ‘andragogy’ being used for how adults learn. In education studies and initial teacher education the term pedagogy tends to be favoured, and also used as a catch-all term to describe the methods you adopt to engage learners and to maximise learning.

Discussion point

When I was learning to teach I really don’t think I realised at the time the absolute importance of the idea that teaching and learning are so connected – to the point that the learning is more important than the teaching. This is hard – when we start we think so much about ourselves – and feel so much on show; exposed to a group of people. The idea that our behaviour in class is simply a vehicle to engage the learning behaviour of others is difficult to come to terms with – but once you do, it really shapes your planning and your classroom practice.

How might this observation help you to think about your own assumptions about teaching?

Can teachers ‘make a difference’?

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It is important to recognise that teaching is a ‘social situation’. By this we mean that it takes place within a social context – it is open to bombardment by wider social forces. The doors of an educational institution might be closed, but they are open to the effects of class, gender, ethnicity, location, globalisation, policy and the trends and fashions of the media.

As a society, we often hold education up as both one of our most valuable assets and at the same time, one of our most valuable tools for social change. While this is true, education is but a part of a much wider complex society and in turn, part of a much wider global stage. Education alone cannot compensate for the ills of society. And yet it sometimes feels as if teachers hold the weight of the rest of the society upon their shoulders.

Although education is shaped by some powerful social forces, it is still possible for us to identify teaching that is ‘trend-breaking’: practice that enables learners to obtain higher than would otherwise be indicated by national and regional trends in attainment according to social factors such as class, gender and ethnicity.

M-level thinking: Situatedness

All social activity (of which education and classroom practice is but a part) is what some social scientists call ‘situated’. This means that we can only understand the activity by thinking about where it occurs and about how the roles and relationships between those involved are constructed. Within education, the variables that affect classroom practice (inside and outside the school or college) are hotly contested. How might these variables affect teaching and learning or locate it in relation to the environment it occurs within?

Who are you? What do you wish to become?

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Within all this complex array of pressures, forces and theories, at some point you need to recognise the role of choice in becoming a professional t...