Beginning Teaching is part of the successful Critical Guides for Teacher Educators series edited by Ian Menter.
Beginning Teaching is part of the successful Critical Guides for Teacher Educators series edited by Ian Menter.
Beginning Teachers' Learning: Making experience count
72
Beginning Teachers' Learning: Making experience count
72Paperback(First Edition)
-
PICK UP IN STORE
Your local store may have stock of this item.
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Beginning Teaching is part of the successful Critical Guides for Teacher Educators series edited by Ian Menter.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781910391174 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Critical Publishing |
| Publication date: | 04/27/2015 |
| Series: | Critical Guides for Teacher Educators |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 72 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.15(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.20(d) |
About the Author
Katharine Burnis a university lecturer in education at the University of Oxford where she leads the PGCE history programme. She taught history for 10 years in school and became fascinated by the process of professional learning, first as a mentor of beginning teachers and then as a head of department desperately trying to keep more senior colleagues focused on developing their classroom practice. After completing a doctorate studying history teachers' learning in school and university, she became research officer for the Developing Expertise of Beginning Teachers (DEBT) project, a longitudinal study of 24 beginning teachers that traced their development over the course of their initial training and through the first two years of their career.
Hazel Haggerwas co-director of the Developing Expertise of Beginning Teachers (DEBT) project. She taught English for many years before joining the University of Oxford in order to contribute to the development of one of the earliest ITE partnerships, and went on to become PGCE course director. Her doctoral research focused on ways of making practising teachers' expertise accessible to beginners and she has written extensively on teachers' learning and development.
Trevor Mutton is the current PGCE course director at the University of Oxford, where he also contributes to the Master's programme in Learning and Teaching. He taught Modern Foreign Languages before joining the university and has since been involved in a range of research into language teaching and into the nature of beginning teachers' learning (including the Developing Expertise of Beginning Teachers (DEBT) project).
Read an Excerpt
Beginning Teachers' Learning
Making Experience Count
By Katharine Burn, Hazel Hagger, Trevor Mutton
Critical Publishing Ltd
Copyright © 2015 Katharine Burn, Hazel Hagger and Trevor MuttonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-910391-17-4
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION: LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE
The ideal beginner
It is easy to paint a portrait of the ideal beginning teacher, to conjure up the mix of enthusiasm, thoughtfulness and commitment that characterises an effective learner and nascent colleague – someone with whom you would be happy to share your classes, to observe and advise as they get to grips with the demands of the role.
Such a trainee would arrive not only full of high aspirations for their pupils but also fully aware of how much they, too, had to learn. They would recognise the importance of thorough planning before any lesson and the value of finding out about their pupils' current levels of knowledge and common misconceptions before determining what their objectives should be. While they would seek advice at the planning stage and feedback on their early teaching endeavours, they would also take responsibility for self -evaluation and approach any debriefing with a list of aspects that they had already identified as requiring improvement and even some suggestions about how to make those changes.
While aware of their weaknesses, they would take a realistic view of their own development, recognising where things had genuinely worked well and seeking to build on them. They would welcome constructive criticism, accepting it in the positive spirit in which it was intended, and look for opportunities to take it on board. They would also be alert to the opportunities available to them to learn from their pupils: identifying from the pupils' difficulties where a fuller explanation was needed; paying attention to the pupils' questions and the strategies on which they tended to rely, in order to rethink their own instruction and consider alternative methods.
This may all sound too good to be true, but this particular portrait is not an imaginary one. Although we have given him a pseudonym, Hanif, whom we tracked within a research project through his training year and on into his first two years as a qualified mathematics teacher, displayed all these qualities. He was indeed an outstanding trainee who made tremendous progress. His mentor and other colleagues within the mathematics department thoroughly enjoyed working with him and were always happy to share their ideas, advice and resources with him (as they did with each other). Moreover, the approaches that he had adopted as a trainee continued to inspire his professional learning over the next two years. He always recognised that there was more to learn, insisting that every lesson brought something new. When invited to predict how his first year as a newly qualified teacher (NQT) might compare with his training year, he immediately emphasised his need to go on learning:
Well, for a start the big similarity is that I'll always be learning. Even going beyond an NQT, there is always going to be something else that I can learn. So many million more things that I can learn, in fact.
He was adamant that if the day came when he failed to learn anything new, he would leave teaching.
This positive approach, established during his training year, was undoubtedly helped by an exemplary induction mentor, who set aside regular meeting times each week during Hanif's first year of teaching. This mentor went further, ensuring that the following year's timetable would allow them to keep teaching parallel classes, thus enabling them to compare strategies and collaborate closely in developing schemes of work. While Hanif took full advantage of his colleague's support, he also continued to recognise how much his pupils had to teach him:
The 30 kids: they're just as good as an observer sitting at the back of the room watching what's going on. Their experience enables them to comment, and that's another piece of the mosaic that can be put in to make the fuller picture.
Where Hanif had relied initially on rigorous planning, he became more alert to the range of ways in which pupils might respond to particular ideas and therefore of the need to establish a clear framework for the lesson within which he could be increasingly responsive to their learning. He repeatedly referred to his marking as an opportunity to reflect on his teaching and frequently sought advice from his classes about the effectiveness of strategies he had used. He also took on certain kinds of responsibility, such as that of IT co-ordinator within the department, that would allow him to talk to colleagues about exactly how they used particular equipment, such as interactive whiteboards and graphic calculators, in their teaching. It is hardly surprising that the adjective we chose to sum up Hanif's teaching career at the end of his second year was 'flourishing'!
Case studies of more complex trajectories
But not everyone is like Hanif. Far from it. While most trainees display many positive dispositions, some of their assumptions about how they will learn to teach and some of their previous experiences may make it much more difficult for them to engage effectively in the processes of school-based training. Moreover, even those who begin professional training with dispositions similar to those displayed by Hanif can become frustrated or overwhelmed if their introduction to the challenges of teaching is inappropriately supported or proves too abrupt or complex for them to handle. Brilliant graduates with equally high aspirations for their pupils may find their early failures hard to bear and struggle to make sense of, or to connect with, their pupils' current perspectives. Career changers, highly skilled in other fields, may struggle to come to terms with their novice status and their lack of the knowledge and skills that experienced teachers take for granted. Passionate but inexperienced novices, desperate to prove themselves in challenging contexts, may misinterpret advice as personal criticism or quickly lose confidence if that advice does not seem to be immediately effective.
In offering guidance to school-based teacher educators, as this book seeks to do, it makes sense not to focus on the stars who are obviously following a brilliant trajectory, but to concentrate on those beginners with more complicated journeys, teasing out from their experiences the nature of the difficulties that learning to teach can present, before identifying those mentoring strategies that do most to generate and sustain a positive orientation towards learning from experience in school. The three case studies that follow are therefore intended to establish the key challenges and questions that this book addresses. All of them are teachers that we encountered, like Hanif, in our three-year research project studying the Developing Expertise of Beginning Teachers (the DEBT project). (See, for example, Hagger et al, 2008; Mutton et al, 2010; Burn et al, 2010.)
The DEBT project
Altogether we tracked 24 teachers for three years, recruiting them from two well-established partnership schemes at the beginning of their training year. In each case, their Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) programme was planned jointly by the university and participating schools, and included 120 days spent in school, divided between two placements. The data that we collected included observation (and filming) of individual lessons taught at regular intervals – four times during the PGCE year, and once a term for the following two years. This gave us ten lessons for each teacher, each followed by an interview, in which we asked the teacher to break the lesson into its main sections and first to describe and then to evaluate each section in whatever way they chose. We probed their responses, inviting them to share any thoughts about possible refinements or adaptations in light of their reflections, but not offering any judgements or suggestions of our own. We also asked them to explain the thinking behind their planning and to reflect at the end on any particular insights that they had gained from it. Once we had finished discussing the lesson, we asked them to reflect in more general terms on their professional learning since we had last seen them. At the end of each year we invited them to review their development over the whole period.
In collecting and analysing this data, we were guided by two central research questions: 'What are the beginning teachers learning?' and 'How are they learning?'. In the case studies that follow we are mainly drawing on our findings about how the teachers were learning – particularly their approach towards learning from experience, which was obviously fundamental to their learning in school, both during the PGCE year and as they took up their first professional post. We will draw on this analysis in more detail in subsequent chapters, but here we present their stories to help you think about the challenges involved in learning to teach and their implications for anyone trying to support that learning in school.
Case Study 1
Limiting the vision to reduce the challenge: Rhiannon
Rhiannon, like Hanif, was a mathematics trainee. Although she had not previously worked in schools, experience leading a lively Brownie pack had given her a good grounding in managing groups of young people, and an awareness of the importance of effective organisation and clear instructions when setting up tasks. She was therefore quite well prepared for her early lessons and actually found it easier than Hanif had done to arrive appropriately prepared with resources ready as she needed them. However, while she clearly found mathematics interesting and enjoyable, she rarely communicated the same enthusiasm as he did or became as caught up in thinking about how the pupils were trying to make sense of the ideas that they were working with. While Hanif was always alert to pupils' thinking and increasingly tried to understand how they were interpreting new ideas, Rhiannon's focus on their learning was more narrowly directed towards ensuring that they had got things right. At least it became much more narrowly focused after one of her earliest lessons, when she had tried to adopt a much more open, discovery-oriented approach and had quickly become overwhelmed by the diversity of responses that this had yielded.
This particular lesson seemed to be profoundly influential in Rhiannon's early development. She had been encouraged to try out an exploratory activity, in which pupils could choose the collection of three numbers that they used in plotting a particular spiral pattern on squared paper. However, the pupils, who embraced the challenge quite enthusiastically, soon began to make more unusual choices that Rhiannon had not anticipated. These gave rise to more complicated variations, making it difficult for them to identify the recurring features and rules underlying the formation of particular patterns. Rhiannon's response, as she saw the path she had mapped out splintering into myriad different trails, was to close down the pupils' options, restricting the choices they could make so that the outcomes became easier for her to manage.
This unsettling experience, and Rhiannon's rather panicked reaction to it, seemed to freeze her development, making her much less ambitious in her choice of teaching strategies and essentially less ambitious for the pupils' learning. More significantly perhaps, the willingness that she had shown in that particular lesson to experiment with investigative approaches to mathematics education almost entirely disappeared thereafter. While she had previously been quite keen to try things out, she became much more reluctant to take risks to broaden her repertoire. The deliberate commitment to her own learning and capacity to plan for it, so evident in her approach to that particular lesson, effectively disappeared and did not reappear in our interviews with Rhiannon until the end of her NQT year.
This is not to say that Rhiannon did not go on to learn a great deal. In each interview during the training year, she could identify new insights from her teaching and commented positively on how much progress she had made. She also referred to a range of sources from which she was learning, including observation of other teachers, the opportunity to mark pupils' books and her mentor's feedback, which was 'helping the most'. Her comments, however, were almost always focused on what she had already learned; we rarely heard her articulate any kind of agenda for her future learning. Her approach seemed to be essentially reactive: looking back, often with a degree of surprise and bewilderment, to discover what she had learned, rather than identifying specific issues that she intended to address.
I don't know really. It's strange. It's all just happening. It's not until I look back at the Standards and I think 'Gosh, I'm doing this! This is just happening naturally now.' I'm getting constant feedback from the other teachers, the other members of staff, and that's brilliant. They highlight things that I never think of, whether it's just because they are sitting at the back and just observing the whole lesson and they can pick up on particular things, whereas because I'm involved right in there within the class and in the teaching I'm not aware of certain things.
As this reflection reveals, Rhiannon found it difficult to focus her attention on specific aspects while she was teaching. In reporting her perceptions of particular lessons, her accounts were noticeably shorter than Hanif's and tended to be concerned with her management of the pupils and of the activities. There was much less explicit consideration of the pupils' thinking or of their approaches to particular kinds of question. In the early lesson discussed above, the pupils' diverse responses essentially presented themselves as a management problem. The only other occasions on which Rhiannon focused in detail on the pupils' capabilities and their approaches to mathematical problems tended to be when she was discussing tasks attempted for homework that she was marking later. These gave her the chance to think more carefully about their learning than was possible during lessons.
The feedback that Rhiannon valued so highly and her determination to create well-ordered and appropriately managed lessons undoubtedly gave her a secure grounding in teaching and a basic repertoire of strategies about which she could feel confident. However, there was little excitement or passion invested in her work, and lessons tended to follow a rather predictable format. The ideas on which she drew in explaining her plans came from a limited range of sources, essentially restricted to her placement school, but she showed little awareness that the pupils in her classes could also be a key resource in helping her to develop further.
While Rhiannon was able to consolidate her knowledge and skills as she settled into her first year of teaching, we saw few signs of significant development. Although she referred to her head of department as an invaluable source of support and guidance, she rarely identified new priorities or particular issues that she wanted to address. Her frame of reference tended to remain limited to ideas within the scheme of work and the school's resources. Her learning was still largely undirected, arising particularly from identifying and responding to her own mistakes. Since fewer things were obviously going wrong, her learning curve had become 'much less steep' than in her training year. However, it was clear that she felt well supported and was given considerable encouragement, feedback and a number of opportunities to learn from others.
Although Rhiannon's ambitions seemed to remain limited during her first year of teaching, the formal opportunities that she was given to observe other teachers were clearly bearing fruit during her second year, when a programme of shared observation and feedback was extended more systematically across the department. While she had remained nervous in her first year about pupils experimenting with different approaches to particular kinds of problems, her outlook seemed to undergo a gradual but striking change over the course of the following year. Not only did she talk more positively about investigative work and start advising the pupils to try out different ways of approaching particular questions or tasks, she also began to recognise that the pupils could be a key resource for her learning as a teacher and that she needed to pay attention to what they could offer:
It's the feedback from the pupils that's surprising me and affecting the way that I teach or that I think about teaching. If I think I know a class and I know the individuals, the pitch of the lesson is always directed at them, suited for their level. But if the pupils are still going to surprise me about their level and their understanding, then I'm still going to have to alter the pitch and the level each time.
While this uncertainty would previously have troubled her, she had, by the end of her second year, developed sufficient confidence to deviate from her plans and to respond much more directly to the pupils' particular needs:
I would guess that my confidence is probably reflected in my teaching, that I'm not as rigid in my lesson plans, in my lesson delivery. I've now got the confidence to be able to swap and change things more readily than I would have done before.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Beginning Teachers' Learning by Katharine Burn, Hazel Hagger, Trevor Mutton. Copyright © 2015 Katharine Burn, Hazel Hagger and Trevor Mutton. Excerpted by permission of Critical Publishing Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
About the series editor vi
About the authors vii
Foreword Ian Menter viii
Chapter 1 Introduction: learning from experience 1
Chapter 2 What are the challenges of learning to teach? 17
Chapter 3 What do we know about beginning teachers as learners? 32
Chapter 4 How can we help beginning teachers to become more effective learners? 48
References 59
Index 62