Katharine Burn

Practice makes perfect? Learning to learn as a teacher

The context of this research is one in which teachers are now expected to equip their pupils with the disposition and skills for life‐long learning. It is vital, therefore, that teachers themselves are learners, not only in developing their practice but also in modelling for pupils the process of continual learning. This paper is based on a series of post‐lesson interviews, conducted with 25 student teachers following a one‐year postgraduate course within two well‐established school‐based partnerships of initial teacher training. Its focus is on the approaches that the student teachers take to their own learning. Four interviews, conducted with each student teacher over the course of the year, explored their thinking in relation to planning, conducting and evaluating an observed lesson, and their reflections on the learning that informed, or resulted from, that lesson. The findings suggest that while the student teachers all learn from experience, the nature and extent of that learning varies considerably within a number of different dimensions. We argue that understanding the range of approaches that student teachers take to professional learning will leave teacher educators better equipped to help ensure that new entrants to the profession are both competent teachers and competent professional learners.

Professional knowledge and identity in a contested discipline: challenges for student teachers and teacher educators

This paper focuses on the challenges to their professional identity encountered by both experienced and beginning teachers in the course of research and development work intended to develop student teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge. It reports findings from a collaborative action research project within a well‐established initial teacher education partnership that was intended to develop more effective ways of supporting student teachers’ learning in relation to two controversial aspects of the secondary school history curriculum: historical enquiry and historical interpretation. The tight focus on procedural concepts at the heart of the discipline made it possible to explore the challenges presented to the student teachers’ identity as subject specialists as they sought to develop new forms of professional knowledge as subject teachers. Simultaneously the research and development process itself also revealed profound challenges to the school‐based teacher educators’ sense of identity—both as teachers and as mentors—that highlighting such contested concepts could pose. In seeking to address these challenges two apparently contradictory, but essentially complementary, approaches seem to be called for. The first is a proper acknowledgement of existing knowledge and expertise—that of the beginning teachers as well as that of their mentors. The second is the forging of a new form of professional identity for mentors: an identity which depends not merely on existing knowledge, but on the capacity to generate new professional knowledge; an identity which includes a role as learner, not merely one as an ‘expert’ teacher.

Learning to plan, planning to learn: the developing expertise of beginning teachers

Learning how to plan is recognised as a key skill that beginning teachers have to develop but there has been little research examining how they may actually learn to plan. This paper, based on the analysis of 10 post-lesson interviews with 17 secondary school teachers across three years (the PGCE year and the first two years in teaching) focuses on: what these beginning teachers learned about planning; the nature of that planning; and the development of their awareness as to what planning could and could not achieve. The findings demonstrate that learning how to plan is a feature of beginning teachers’ learning well beyond the PGCE year, indicating that it is through planning that teachers are able to learn about teaching and through teaching that they are able to learn about planning. We discuss the implications for teacher educators and others involved in the professional learning of beginning teachers.

Curriculum theory, curriculum policy and the problem of ill‐disciplined thinking

This paper examines the implications of policy fracture and arms length governance within the decision‐making processes currently shaping curriculum design within the English education system. In particular, it argues that an unresolved ‘ideological fracture’ at the government level has been passed down to school leaders whose response to the dilemma is distorted by the target‐driven agenda of arms length agencies. Drawing upon the findings of a large‐scale online survey of history teaching in English secondary schools, this paper illustrates the problems that occur when policy‐making is divorced from curriculum theory, and in particular from any consideration of the nature of knowledge. Drawing on the social realist theory of knowledge, we argue that the rapid spread of alternative curricular arrangements, implemented in the absence of an understanding of curriculum theory, undermines the value of disciplined thinking to the detriment of many young people, particularly those in areas of social and economic deprivation.

A review of ‘research-informed clinical practice’ in Initial Teacher Education

This review examines the kinds of relationship between research and practice that have been envisaged in programmes designed to provide opportunities for beginning teachers to engage in ‘research-informed clinical practice’. Although the terminology varies, scope for inclusion is defined by an intention to facilitate and deepen the interplay between the different kinds of knowledge that are generated and validated within the different contexts of school and university. A variety of approaches have been taken to achieving this kind of integration; not merely extending the time that beginning teachers spend in school, but focusing on the processes by which professional knowledge is created, for example, by equipping beginning teachers to act as researchers, adopting a problem-solving orientation to practice. A range of approaches within and beyond the UK are examined, acknowledging the policy contexts in which they have been developed and comparing the rationales advanced in support of them. Finally the paper examines the claims advanced for the impact of such research-based clinical practice and the quality of the evidence that underpins them, in relation both to beginning teachers’ professional learning and to student outcomes.

Surprising but not shocking: The reality of the first year of teaching

The need in many countries not merely to recruit but – critically – to retain effective teachers has been a key factor in shaping induction policies. Past reviews of teacher induction have highlighted two important sources of difficulty: novices’ own unrealistic expectations of teaching and of students, and others’ unrealistic expectations of the novices. This article, which examines the relationship between teachers’ expectations of the first year of teaching and the realities that they encounter, explores the ways in which two policies in England – school-based initial teacher education partnerships (established since the early 1990s) and formal induction arrangements (re-introduced in 2000) have impacted on beginning teachers’ experience of the transition. Drawing on data from a three-year longitudinal study it focuses specifically on how the teachers’ reflections on their experience of their first year in teaching are related to the accounts that they give of their learning over the same period.

Strengthening and sustaining professional learning in the second year of teaching

The data discussed in this paper derive from post‐lesson and end‐of‐year interviews with 17 teachers in their second year of teaching. They form part of a longitudinal study which first tracked these teachers through their initial postgraduate teacher education programme and induction year. In the light of earlier analysis, which had highlighted both the enduring importance of individuals’ dispositions towards their own learning and the profound sense of professional isolation that some teachers experience once the support of their induction year is withdrawn, this paper focuses specifically on the interplay between teachers’ orientations towards their own professional learning and the nature of the learning environments in which they are working. The complex interrelationships between these two dimensions are illuminated by six case studies, which offer strong support to those who have challenged exclusive conceptualisations of ‘learning’ as either ‘construction’ or ‘participation’. The findings have important implications for all those responsible for the professional education of beginning and early career teachers, especially as they respond to the government launch in England of a new ‘national framework’ intended (eventually) to offer opportunities for Masters level professional learning to all newly qualified teachers.

Deconstructing the Carter Review: competing conceptions of quality in England’s ‘school-led’ system of initial teacher education

Abstract The commitment to establish a ‘school-led’ system of teacher education in England, announced by the Coalition Government in 2011 and relentlessly pursued thereafter, represented a radical departure from previous kinds of initial teacher education partnership. While it is entirely consistent with a neoliberal agenda, with its strong regulatory framework and appeal to market mechanisms, it is also underpinned by a particular conception of teaching as a craft – ‘best learnt as an apprentice observing a master craftsman or woman’. In 2014, the government established a Review of Initial Teacher Training, led by a primary school head teacher, Sir Andrew Carter. This signalled the recognition of teacher education as a ‘policy problem’, adopting Cochran-Smith’s term. The ensuing report, published in early 2015, was more nuanced than might have been anticipated, although a number of profound tensions emerge from a closer analytical reading; four of these tensions are similar to those previously defined by Cochran-Smith and two are newly emergent. This paper identifies and discusses these tensions as they appear in the Carter Review and relates them to wider debates about the links between teaching, teacher education, evidence and research and to policy-making processes in education.

English history teachers’ views on what substantive content young people should be taught

Abstract Public and policy discourse about the content of history curricula is frequently contested, but the voice of history teachers is often absent from such debate. Drawing on a large-scale online survey of history teachers in England, this paper explores their responses to major curriculum reforms proposed by the Coalition government in February 2013. In particular, it examines teachers’ responses to government plans to prescribe a list of topics, events and individuals to be taught chronologically that all students would be expected to study. Nearly 550 teachers responded to the survey, and more than two-thirds of them provided additional written comments on the curriculum proposals. This paper examines these comments, with reference to a range of curriculum models. The study reveals a deep antagonism towards the proposals for various reasons, including concerns about the extent and nature of the substantive content proposed and the way in which it should be sequenced. Analysis of these reactions provides an illuminating insight into history teachers’ perspectives. Whilst the rationales that underpin their thinking seem to have connections to a variety of different theoretical models, the analysis suggests that more attention could usefully be devoted to the idea of developing frameworks of reference.

School subject departments as sites for science teachers learning pedagogical content knowledge

This paper reports a study that explored science teacher learning of pedagogical content knowledge and the factors that facilitated this in their workplace, schools. The research design employed interview and observation in two secondary school science departments in England. A seven part construct of PCK was used to analyse all data and the findings indicated that, routinely, teachers collaborated in social settings to share knowledge, principally in relation to two areas of PCK, subject matter and teaching strategies and resources. The main resources teachers drew on were colleagues as well as a key material artefact, shared teaching schemes. While recognising our view of PCK does not abandon the idea of teacher knowledge as being individually stored and applied, rather the argument here is that school science is now so broad, complex and context-dependent that much of it needs to be off-loaded onto material artefacts and distributed amongst teachers. There are practical implications of this study for both ITE and CPD programmes in shifting the focus away from individualistic provision far removed from teachers’ workplaces to that which works in the school context and at the department level where teachers are able to benefit from, and contribute to, shared knowledge and expertise therein.