Elaine Wilson

New teacher learning: substantive knowledge and contextual factors

This article brings together an overview of ideas about teacher learning from both teacher education and workplace learning literature, and examines what and how newly qualified secondary school teachers learn in the early years of their career. We discuss the types of knowledge new teachers encounter and present a typology of teacher learning. The article also draws on a three-year longitudinal study, presenting findings from surveys of new and more experienced teachers together with analysis of interviews with ten new teachers during the first two years of their teaching career. We present findings about how these new teachers have learned in their first two years of teaching and explore the importance of the school context and other learning factors. Suggestions for future research are also included.

The role of emotion in teaching: are there differences between male and female newly qualified teachers’ approaches to teaching?

Emotions play a crucial role in communication and engagement between people. This paper focuses on the extent to which new teachers consider and value the emotional component of teaching for the engagement and motivation of their students and themselves. Moreover, drawing on the literature on gender and emotion, which consistently cites females of all ages as having a greater capacity to empathise, we looked to see if female teachers are better equipped at engaging their students and whether there are differences in the emotional teaching styles of male and female newly qualified teachers. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches were employed. Analysis of questionnaires revealed significant gender difference in approaches to teaching and perceptions of it, and led us to pursue this issue further by interviewing a selection of the teachers. Teachers’ comments reflected differences between men and women in the ways they visualise the role of emotion in teaching. When faced with challenges and adversities in the classroom, such as disruptive and disengaged students, they employ different strategies to combat them, and typically, female teachers would go to greater lengths, often employing emotion tactics to re‐engage students. The research highlights the importance of focusing on emotional engagement in teaching, the consequences for teacher retention and implications for teacher training.

‘Support our networking and help us belong!’: listening to beginning secondary school science teachers

This study, drawing on the voice of beginning teachers, seeks to illuminate their experiences of building professional relationships as they become part of the teaching profession. A networking perspective was taken to expose and explore the use of others during the first three years of a teacher’s workplace experience. Three case studies, set within a wider sample of 11 secondary school science teachers leaving one UK university’s PostGraduate Certificate in Education, were studied. The project set out to determine the nature of the networks used by teachers in terms of both how they were being used for their own professional development and perceptions of how they were being used by others in school. Affordances and barriers to networking were explored using notions of identity formation through social participation. The focus of the paper is on how the teachers used others to help shape their sense of belonging to this, their new workplace. The paper develops ideas from network theories to argue that membership of the communities are a subset of the professional inter‐relationships teachers utilise for their professional development. During their first year of teaching, eight teachers were interviewed, completing 13 semi‐structured interviews. This was supplemented in Year 2 by a questionnaire survey of their experiences. In the third year of the programme, 11 teachers (including the original sample of eight) were surveyed using a network mapping tool in which they represented their communications with people, groups and resources. Finally, three of the teachers (common to both samples) were then interviewed specifically about their networking practices and experiences using the generation of their network map as a stimulated recall focus. The implications of the analysis of these accounts are that these beginning teachers did not perceive of themselves wholly as novices and that their personal aspirations to increase participation in practical science, develop a career or work for pupils holistically did not always sit comfortably with the school communities into which they were being accommodated. While highlighting the importance of trust and respect in establishing relationships, these teachers’ accounts highlight the importance of finding ‘peers’ from whom they can find support and with whom they can reflect and potentially collaborate towards developing practice. They also raise questions about who these ‘peers’ might be and where they might be found.

Developing a user guide to integrating new technologies in science teaching and learning: teachers’ and pupils’ perceptions of their affordances

This paper reports outcomes of a project in which five teachers developed a web‐based user guide to integrating new technologies in secondary science teaching. The guide aimed to support the initial education of trainee teachers, and the professional development of mentors, in working with, and understanding the affordances of, new technologies. In developing the guide, each teacher researched, trialled in their lessons, and wrote about, a different technology, namely wikis, digital video, podcasts, personal digital assistants, and games consoles. By collecting data alongside this process, this paper examines teachers’ and pupils’ perceptions of the affordances of such technologies in the science classroom. The authors undertook individual interviews with teachers and focus group interviews with students. Pupils’ and teachers’ perceptions clustered around four main themes: construction and social construction of learning, differentiation, assessment, and motivation and engagement.

Powerful pedagogical strategies in initial teacher education

The development of beginning teachers’ practice during a school placement is a multiplicity of mediated interaction between university and school based systems. Both systems have the common aim of training effective teachers. However day‐to‐day internal institution matters can cause tension between the learning goals set out for the beginning teacher by the university and the schools’ drive to ensure maximum student performance in ‘high stake’ national tests. The aim of the intervention was to set up structures which might enable beginning teachers to develop the capacity to think about and reflect explicitly on their practice, through purposive activity in an authentic classroom environment. The context of the activity was a secondary science course which aimed to encourage new teachers to empathize with secondary school pupils (aged 11–16) and understand their conceptual difficulties in learning about science within the constraints of a ‘curriculum delivery’ lead culture. The dialogue engaged in as part of the intervention helped beginning teachers to think critically about practice during school placements.

Children should be seen and heard: the power of student voice in sustaining new teachers

Recent research has highlighted the merits of consulting children in both primary and secondary schools about their teaching and learning. This article looks at the effectiveness of pupil voice in not only maximizing the potential of pupils and students but also the consequences for helping teachers in turn — and especially newly qualified teachers, who might encounter obstacles during their early months of teaching. Interviews were conducted with 11 secondary school science teachers in their first three years of teaching in order to ascertain the quality of teaching and the degree to which teachers felt that they were successful in communicating the subject matter to their students. The findings showed that consulting young people is one way of responding to the needs of teachers as well as to the pupils themselves and we discuss the potential of pupil voice in harnessing the thoughts and feelings of pupils and ultimately achieving effective teaching and learning.

What makes a good mentor? who makes a good mentor? the views of year 8 mentees

Mentoring schemes are being increasingly used with young people, both in and out of schools, for a variety of purposes. In relation to cross-age mentoring in school, a recent review of research sug...

The transfer of content knowledge in a cascade model of professional development

A cascade model of professional development presents a particular risk that ‘knowledge’ promoted in a programme will be diluted or distorted as it passes from originators of the programme to local trainers and then to the target teachers. Careful monitoring of trainers’ and teachers’ knowledge as it is transferred through the system is therefore imperative. This paper focuses on the transfer of content knowledge through an in-service teacher professional development programme and offers an innovative methodology for investigating knowledge transfer, i.e. through insights gained during a mentoring process. The findings suggest that this methodology facilitated assessment of knowledge transfer because it involved the identification of knowledge in practice. The focus on knowledge in practice appeared to avoid a deficit model of trainers’/teachers’ knowledge and revealed that content knowledge was generally being successfully transferred throughout the system. A detailed analysis of different aspects of content knowledge transfer suggested various foci for additional training.

Rhetoric or reality? A case study into how, if at all, practical work supports learning in the classroom

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the use and value of practical work in the secondary school science classroom. Informed by the findings of a large survey of students from a wide variety of schools, a case study of pupils in the middle secondary range sought to investigate the precise role of practical work in the learning of a specific topic over a series of lessons. Design/methodology/approach – Qualitative and quantitative assessment of academic progress of two classes of pupils revealed that students who undertook practical tasks made greater gains in knowledge and understanding than those who undertook non-practical alternatives. In order to explore students’ views about the practical tasks and whether they found them to be an affective and effective aid for their learning, data were collected using questionnaires, lesson observations and interviews of focus groups. Findings – The data suggest three reasons why practical work supported pupils’ learning. First, practical work supported ...

Reflections on the process of implementing a large scale teacher improvement programme throughout Kazakhstan.

‘Kazakhstan is going through a period of rapid and energetic educational reform aimed at raising the quality of educational experience for all and addressing in particular the inequalities of opportunity and achievement between urban schools and mainly small and multi-grade rural schools’. The ultimate goal of the teacher education intervention programme was to build on existing pedagogical practices but also to shift classroom teaching so that all pupils would become highly motivated and self regulated learners. Professional Capital extended. Masters level pedagogical knowledge base increased.