The Management of Student Teachers' Learning

A Guide for Professional Tutors in Secondary Schools

H. Hagger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134984206
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Aimed at professional tutors, this text explains the role of managing student teachers in secondary school settings. It describes how to organize school-based teacher training, how to ensure proper communication between teaching staff and how to measure the effectiveness of mentoring.

Chapter 1
Schools for Initial Teacher Education

Introduction

After a century during which the main responsibility for initial teacher education was given to higher education institutions (HEI), the UK government has now asked schools to take on much of this responsibility. The invitation comes in various forms, but all of them have in common the expectation of a greatly increased commitment by schools to this work, and also the offer of financial resources to support the work. How should schools respond?

Among the questions which schools should properly be asking themselves are the following:

• What would student teachers based mainly in this school be likely to learn about teaching and the work of teachers?
• Does the school as a whole have a clear view about what student teachers ought to be learning, and about how that might be achieved?
• What effects would the acceptance of such responsibilities have on the school? What would be the costs and the benefits?
• What would the school need to do in order to make a good job of ITE, and also to maximize the benefits to itself?

The last of these questions is what this book is about. The answer to it must in the first instance be in terms of such words as 'plan', 'coordinate', 'monitor' and, most generally, 'manage'; and the purpose of this book is to offer practical guidance about the managing of a school's involvement in ITE. More specifically, the book is about the work of the person who, we believe, should be appointed to coordinate this aspect of a school's work, a person whom we shall call the 'Professional Tutor'.

In this introductory chapter we aim briefly to consider the context within which professional tutors need to work, and to consider in broad outline the range of tasks they need to undertake.

Should the school get involved at all?

The first and biggest decision for a school to make is whether and on what terms it should get involved in ITE.

Is the school well placed and willing to take responsibility for preparing good new teachers?

The primary responsibility of schools is of course that of educating their own pupils. On the other hand, how well a school can do that depends on the quality of its teachers, and that in turn depends in no small measure on their initial professional training. In their own interests, therefore, schools have to be realistic about how good a job they can make of ITE; and if a school concludes that, because of its commitment to other demanding innovations or because of the relative inexperience of many of its staff, it could not attain the standards it would want for ITE, then it will be sensible not to get involved.

Are the resources on offer sufficient to allow the school to undertake the task effectively?

Substantial sums of money are on offer to schools for ITE work. On the other hand, the staff most directly concerned will have to spend considerable time on it. Headteachers need to ensure that the money available is sufficient to cover the necessary costs, and also that the extra resources do go where they are needed. What is certain is that there will be no scope for 'creative accounting', whereby the extra money is redirected to other purposes, without damaging effects on teachers and pupils.

What kind of involvement in ITE is sensible?

For the foreseeable future, three main types of scheme are likely to be on offer to schools:

• schemes for which schools, individually or in consortia, accept the overall responsibility
• schemes run by HEI, with schools being paid on a one-off basis for hosting individual student teachers
• partnership schemes planned and run jointly with one or more HEI and with other schools.

In the first type of scheme, schools will receive all the money allocated to training. They will, however, have to take on heavy administrative, planning and coordinating functions - which HEI are much better placed to undertake - without any clear advantage to themselves or to the student teachers. The second type does not offer opportunities to radically improve the quality of initial teacher education in that such schemes make it impossible for schools to plan and timetable efficiently for this work or to exercise any effective influence on the programme as a whole. In principle, the most satisfying system is the partnership type of scheme, but there is enormous variation among such schemes and schools should look at each one on its merits.

What can the school make of its involvement in ITE?

Schools ought to be looking proactively at the possibilities which ITE offers. What can the school make of the opportunities available, both for the benefit of the student teachers and for the benefit of the school itself?

What involvement means for the school

ITE as a whole-school commitment

School-based ITE can work well, and to the school's own benefit, only if it is taken on as a whole-school commitment. The effectiveness of what the school offers student teachers, and the contribution which they in turn can make to the life of the school, depend on much more than their work in classrooms under the guidance of their subject teacher mentors and their work with the professional tutor. Both the range of things to be learned and the influences on student teachers' learning extend much more widely; their learning will depend on whether they are generally treated as part of the school or as mere visitors, and on the quality of their experience of:

• the staffroom
• the school's administrative arrangements
• the school's communication systems
• departmental meetings
• the learning support department and its staff
• tutorial work
• parent consultation meetings
• whole-staff meetings
• working parties
• being inducted into other aspects of the school's work
• the school's INSET programme
• extracurricular activities
• social life with staff.

It has been common in the context of 'teaching practices' for student teachers to be very marginal people in schools, certainly getting practice in teaching, but often not being much taken into account in other ways. As a result, their learning about other aspects of the work of schools, and even about the working lives of beginning teachers, has tended to be slight or, worse, distorted. Their classroom teaching experiences too have often been undermined by their marginal status, especially because their status could be recognized by pupils. School-based teacher education offers an opportunity, and imposes an obligation, to change all this quite radically.

The extent to which ITE will be accepted as a whole-school commitment in any school will depend substantially on the following factors.

The number of student teachers

To be a significant aspect of a school's work, and therefore to be taken seriously by the school as a whole, ITE has to be undertaken on a sufficient scale. When the staff of a school rarely encounter a student teacher, they cannot be expected to view ITE as their concern. But if there are several student teachers in the school most of the time, their presence is likely to affect everyone.

How long each student teacher spends in the school

Busy staff cannot reasonably be expected to make an effort helping people who are in the school for a few weeks only. In contrast, student teachers who are going to be in the school and working with pupils for as long as two terms are much more likely to be worth investing time in: it is worthwhile helping them to understand the school's approach to learning support, to tutorial work, to equal opportunities, to the use of the photocopiers, to collaboration with parents, or whatever an individual staff member's particular area of expertise, responsibility or enthusiasm is.

The headteacher's leadership

As with other aspects of a school's life, much depends on the attitude which the headteacher seems to take to ITE. Making it an agenda item at management team meetings, having a clear view of what it involves, introducing student teachers to the whole staff, taking trouble to spend some time with them, and taking care to appoint an able and senior member of staff as professional tutor, are all important in themselves and also indicators of the headteacher's attitude.

A well worked out scheme

Staff will be most likely to accept ITE as a proper element of the work of the whole school if the scheme in which the school is participating:

• can be clearly explained to them
• has a coherent rationale
• shows respect for teachers' expertise
• is thoughtful and sensible in the demands it makes
• is seen to operate efficiently
• is clearly responsive to feedback.

An able professional tutor

Given these other factors, most of the responsibility for winning whole-school commitment will rest on the shoulders of the professional tutor. While professional tutors cannot on their own ensure that the work of ITE is accepted as a whole-school responsibility, an important part of their work is establishing and maintaining that whole-school commitment.

An ITE team

When a school decides to undertake ITE work, it must then decide how to organize itself for this work. Schools' existing structures and circumstances have to influence their decisions about this, but for all secondary schools there are at least two key roles which need to be fulfilled: those of mentor and professional tutor.

Mentors as teacher educators (classroom teaching)

Each student teacher needs a mentor who takes primary responsibility for initial professional education as a classroom teacher. Mentors should be teachers of the subjects in which their student teachers are specializing. Mentoring is complex and demanding work (cf. Hagger et al., 1993; Mclntyre etal., 1993) and should properly be seen as the core activity of ITE. The mentor's role can usefully be seen as having four main elements:

• working directly with the student teachers in various ways (eg, collaborative teaching; observation and feedback; discussion)
• managing the student teachers' learning about teaching, in collaboration with the HEI, and drawing appropriately on departmental colleagues' classes and their expertise
• assessing the student teachers' classroom teaching (and their capacity to evaluate and develop their teaching) for formative and summative purposes
• providing personal support for the student teachers, who will often experience both insecurity and failure, perhaps on a scale and in a more personal sense than ever before.

The professional tutor as teacher educator (whole-school issues)

The work of the modern school and even of the beginning teacher, however, is far from being limited to subject teaching. Student teachers have to be introduced to many other aspects of how schools operate and to other tasks in which teachers have to become skilled. This, we suggest, is properly the main educational role of the professional tutor, for all the student teachers in the school. This role may be seen as directly paralleling that described for the mentor, in terms of four main elements:

• working directly with the student teachers in seminars and workshops and supervising their investigations
• managing student teachers' learning about different aspects of schooling, in collaboration with the HEI, and drawing appropriately on school colleagues' work and expertise
• assessing the students teachers' professional competence and attitudes in relation to aspects of a teacher's role beyond the classroom
• complementing the mentors in providing personal support for the student teachers.

The professional tutor as manager

As already suggested, the professional tutor has a more general managerial role in coordinating the overall ITE work of the school. In our view it is sensible, but not essential, for the same person to combine these managerial and educational functions. It ensures, for example, that the person in the managerial role gets to know the individual student teachers very well. It also facilitates the professional tutor's work as a participant leader of the school's ITE team.

Importance of team work

The quality of a school's work 111ITE and the benefits which the school gains depend considerably on the extent to which the professional tutor and mentors work together as a team. It is through teamwork that there can most effectively be:

• coordination of the student teachers' programmes
• exchange of good practice among mentors
• guidance by the professional tutor in developing the school's practice
• mutual support in dealing with the pressures and frustrations of the work
• quality control by the professional tutor in relation to the I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Schools for Initial Teacher Education
• 2 The Professional Tutor's Managerial Role
• 3 Educating Student Teachers about the Work of Schools
• 4 The Pastoral Aspect of the Teacher's Role
• 5 Costs and Benefits for the School
• References
• Index