Initial Teacher Education at Scale

Quality Conundrums

Clare Brooks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000371536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Debates about what constitutes quality in initial teacher education have resulted in a series of quality conundrums that have to be unravelled by teacher educators. Using the lens of scale and adopting a new approach to understanding quality, this book draws upon empirical research into five large-scale, high-quality university-based teacher education providers in Australia, Canada, England, New Zealand and the US. The resulting model of initial teacher education practice shows how ideological concepts and accountability structures around teacher education are in constant tension with operational realities. The book explores how successful large-scale providers have reconciled those tensions and conundrums to ensure their provision is consistently high quality. The accounts also present a robust defence for university-based teacher education.

The practice-based accounts of how tensions around quality and scale are being reconciled reveal the competing discourses around teacher professionalism, research and the role of the university in teacher education. The analysis presented promises to change the way we view high-quality teacher education across all providers and international contexts, not just those of large scale.

This book will be of great interest to teacher educators, policymakers and educational leaders.

1
Quality conundrums in initial teacher education

During March 2020, after returning from a site visit to a university in Arizona to my London home, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, the country went into lockdown. Confined to my home, surrounded by swathes of data I had collected on my site visits, I reflected on the role of universities in teacher education before the pandemic struck and even more so after. In England, two-thirds through the academic year, student teachers were withdrawn from their placements. Teacher educators got together to consider what this meant for those student teachers, for their progress, qualification and future careers. How would this affect their studies, their learning and how could we support them and our partner schools? In times like this core values become important: what could we do that would be the best possible outcomes for all involved? Parts of the teacher education infrastructure, such as inspections and regulations around minimum periods of school experience, were rapidly disregarded. It felt, at the time, like universities with their specialist expertise were taking a lead. This was empowering, but it was also striking in how working in such an independent way felt unusual.

As a former Head of Initial Teacher Education (ITE), and having been involved in teacher education in a number of ways for 28 years, I have seen the recognition of the expertise of teacher educators change, particularly in the light of government policy changes, changes in schooling, and variations in how teachers are viewed and how their work is defined. In particular, the growing culture of compliance, accountability and governance has affected what teacher educators have been able to do. Commentators such as Connell (2009), Sachs (2015) and Mayer (2017) have criticised how accountability emphasises technical approaches to teaching. They advocate forms of professionalisation which elevate teachers beyond a narrow craft definition but as informed and autonomous professionals. Nevertheless, such accountability forces persist, and arguably it is becoming more and more difficult to counter, as many teacher educators take up the accountability mantra themselves: showing off their labels of achievement, adhering without question and adding additional internal checks to ensure compliance. Undergirding these trends are questions about quality: what does quality teacher education look like? How can it be achieved, monitored and recognised, and how can teacher educators be held accountable and to whom does their accountability lie? Who are the best teacher educators to make it happen?

The research, upon which this book is based, examined teacher education programmes in five different countries. Through exploring the university-based teacher education provision in each place, I have seen how the answers to these quality questions vary from place to place (as the chapters in this book will reveal). Common to all is a strong message that university involvement in ITE is crucial, but complex. It is particularly crucial when educational environments require teachers to do more than perform a set of routines or behaviours, but are looking for teachers who are able to act with integrity, autonomy and to make situational judgements; in these cases, teachers require preparation which is profoundly educational. This distinction elevates teacher education beyond the notion of teacher training, a term often used in the English policy context, and teacher preparation, a term common in the US. Both of these terms emphasise the technical and practical dimensions of teaching. Without doubt the development of practical skills is important for new teachers. However, training and preparation emphasise skill development at the exclusion of the understanding and judicious application of those skills. In that sense, they align with Biesta’s critique of “learnification” (2010) – that it lacks a sense of the educational purpose. Teacher education that equips teachers with the range of knowledges they need to make good situational judgements is an educational and therefore moral enterprise.

This is not a new argument, and one that unsurprisingly is often made by teacher educators based in universities. It is not my intention to repeat that argument, but to augment it by demonstrating how the changing contexts of educating teachers today, internationally, makes this more and more important. The rise of accountability regimes in all aspects of the education sector, in the diversification of teacher education providers and the increase in education stakeholders (sometimes with commercial interests) means that it has never been more important for universities to take an educational stance in their engagement with teachers.

Undoubtedly, I have a self-interest in this view: I am a university-based teacher educator. The research upon which this book is based is exclusively focused on university-based teacher education. It may be the case that non-university-based teacher educators may be able to make similar claims, and I am certainly not seeking to downplay the crucial role that schools play in the education of teachers. The argument presented here is orientated specifically to what goes on in universities. Universities are special and unique places. Their specific status as a civic enterprise makes them a key site equipped to provide teacher education: an education which can stand up in the face of the challenges facing teaching today, particularly those that stem from neoliberal education policies around accountability, governance and performativity. This is not to say that universities are not without influence from neoliberal policies (indeed, this constitutes a theme throughout the book), but that other organisations without a commitment to academic freedom and civic responsibility are more susceptible to these forces. Universities have the capacity to provide a context for educational possibilities.

The professionalisation narrative

There has been a lot of interest recently in teacher education quality which originates from the argument that teachers are important because they are the single most influential variable in student’s achievement. This point stems from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) pronouncement that “teachers matter” following their report on the determinants of student learning, which concluded that the largest variation in outcomes is attributable to social background and the students themselves, but the most important influence “potentially open to policy influence” is teaching, and especially “teacher quality” (OECD, 2005, p. 26). Connell (2009) highlights that it is significant that the OECD do not consider social factors to be within policy influence. But the idea that teachers are the most important factor has been widely taken up by commentators from across the political spectrum.

The focus on teacher education in this book deliberately does not adopt that argument. Teachers are undoubtedly important, because they make up a significant part of the educational infrastructure. But teachers are often not alone in deciding how they undertake their work. Teaching is subject to a range of influences and controls: inspection regimes, testing, reward structures and managerial interventions. Intentionally or not, these affect teachers’ work. Saying that teachers are the most influential factor focuses the attention on discussions about improving education and educational disadvantage firmly onto teachers, making them the “subject of reform” (Ball, 2008). To focus the attention onto teachers ignores the role that the infrastructure, society and wider influences around teachers can play in creating the conditions in which they undertake their work.

The idea that quality teacher education will further professionalise teaching is related to a professionalisation narrative, which needs to be thoroughly questioned. Whitty (2008) highlights that to qualify as a profession, occupations usually require specialist theoretical knowledge, certification, a code of professional conduct orientated towards the “public good” and a powerful professional organisation. Whitty also notes that as teachers have never fully achieved this status, there are aspirations to professionalise teaching through what he calls the “professional project”. However, occupational professionalisation does not occur just because of the introduction of professionalisation strategies: an emphasis on research, a focus on academic knowledge, contextualising practice within a theoretical frame or because qualification takes place in a university, overseen by a teacher educator who holds a doctorate. Professionalisation is part of a wider and dynamic set of influences and relationships: hence why, together with Wisby, Whitty refers to a fourfold typology of teacher professionalisms: tradition, managerialist, collaborative and democratic (2006). Where teacher professionalism falls within this typology is related to the context in which it occurs, the affordances and autonomy teachers are given, in the same way that teacher quality can also be enabled or constrained by the contexts in which it occurs.

The spatial importance of context

To understand how educational contexts vary, it is important to start by recognising the role that education plays in the production and reproduction of inequalities. Research in teacher education often refers to the importance of context, but rarely examines that context conceptually, often seeing context as an interactional or representational problem (Dourish, 2004). This is despite a growing body of work that recognises the importance of space and place in uneven development, and in particular in the production and reproduction of inequalities (Smith, 2010). Expressed simply, some places are more affluent than others, and so some places afford more opportunities than others. Geographers, such as David Harvey, have written extensively about the “geography of it all”, showing how the flow of capital requires space, and how the arrangement of space is fundamental to flows of capital and by extension the equitable distribution of opportunity (2010). Education contributes to these flows through supporting access to social capital, cultural capital and intellectual capital.

But capital is not free-flowing: the movement of capital is controlled often by the elite in society who seek to affect how and where it flows in order to retain their advantage. The implication for education is that affluent populations have better schools, with better teachers and more funding, thereby students that go through this system (often the sons and daughters of the elite) are better prepared to take up roles as the elite and powerful when it is their turn. Less affluent populations have schools with less funding, teachers who are perceived as poorer quality and their students will end up being less prepared to take up similar powerful and influential roles. These patterns are borne out by empirical research: evidence from the US and the UK have highlighted how more disadvantaged communities tend to have less well-prepared teachers (Allen & Sims, 2018; Burgess, 2016; Hanushek & Rivkin, 2012), although the degree of preparation does not necessarily mean teachers are of a poorer quality.

It would seem logical then to conclude that the provision and availability of high-quality teachers are important in opening up educational opportunities. But teachers alone are unable to change the infrastructure which affects the flow of capital. Recognising the influence of such flows is central to understanding the accountability infrastructure around teaching and teacher education: in other words, the conditions that make up how teachers can do their “work”. In order to understand teacher education, we need to understand the wider context within which teaching and teacher education operates.

Teachers are not solely responsible for “equalising” society or for counteracting the material, social and cultur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Quality conundrums in initial teacher education
• 2 The practice quality conundrum
• 3 The research quality conundrum
• 4 The knowledge quality conundrum
• 5 The teacher educator quality conundrum
• 6 The governance quality conundrum
• 7 The contexts for transformation: practice architectures
• 8 The contexts for transformation through a spatial lens
• 9 Modelling ITE practice
• Index