The Trainee Teacher′s Guide to Academic Assignments

A student's guide

Rebecca Austin

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526483362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Essays in Education

This book supports trainee teachers with their written assignments. It helps students to approach their academic writing with confidence, to fully demonstrate whatthey know and to ?ace?assignments! It explains:

1. The value and purpose of assignments - making the writing process easier and more effective from the start

2. How to read and write academically- withpractical, 'how to' support

3. How to respond tomarking and feedback to improve your grades - developing your academic identity and your knowledge and performance for teaching Teacher training is challenging. Balancing teaching with academic work is hard work. This book is here to help.

1 What are assignments for?

This chapter sets the context for assignments in teacher training. It explains how assignments link theory and practice and why this is important. It dispels myths that assignments are simply hoops to jump through. The aim of this chapter is to help you understand how important it is to engage academically with practice – and how this links to the standards.

If you’re reading this, you are training to be a primary school teacher and as part of that training you need to undertake some academic assignments in order to gain credit for a qualification. You might have considered a route into teaching that led to Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) without an associated academic qualification (such as some School Direct routes), but you have chosen to gain a Professional or Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) or an undergraduate degree alongside QTS. This means you are going to be writing assignments which link what you do in the classroom to the whole wealth of research and discussions in the academic world about what makes learning and teaching effective. And this, ultimately, will enable you to reflect more broadly and more deeply on the teaching that you do and the children that you work with so that you can become the very best teacher you can be.

I have often heard students expressing frustration that their achievement in academic assignments doesn’t match the success they experience when working in classroom contexts. To some extent this is understandable when the skills required for each aspect are so different. In my experience, though, those who do well in the classroom and less well in assignments are not necessarily those who lack understanding – rather they struggle to show their understanding in the context of assignments. The aim of this book is to help you demonstrate what you know and understand in the most effective way possible so that your efforts, both in and out of the classroom, get the credit they deserve.

In this introductory chapter, I offer you a particular perspective about assignments so that you can understand the role they play in your classroom practice. It is important that you see the work and effort that goes into assignment writing as having outcomes for your teaching – not just your degree or qualification. If you see what you do in the classroom as the ‘real’ part of your training and the university-based element as simply a set of hoops to jump through, not only will you be missing the point of assignments, you will also find them much harder to do.

Throughout this book, I make links between the work of reading and writing and thinking and learning that you do for assignments and the teaching you do in the classroom – particularly the teaching of reading and writing. As primary school teacher trainees this is a significant aspect of assignment writing that no other subject can lay claim to – your learning about reading and writing as part of the process of assignment writing will, if you let it, be a source of learning for your teaching – no matter what the academic outcomes. If you learn about yourself as a reader and writer and the processes you go through, you will be able to use this to help you as a teacher of reading and writing. I come back to this later in this chapter and throughout the book.

What are assignments for?

Assignments are the designated means by which you are assessed in an academic programme of study. At universities programmes go through series of checks and balances in order to be approved as fit for purpose in terms of the academic award they will offer. Often, students are also included in the discussions about programme and assessment design and in teacher education programmes school partners will be consulted too. Months of work goes into the design of a new programme and there are several stages of scrutiny that a programme must pass – and this scrutiny is not only undertaken within the university, it is examined by others from external institutions to ensure that it fits with national guidelines and standards.

A significant part of the scrutiny centres around the learning outcomes for the programme and individual modules and the means by which those learning outcomes will be assessed. Universities often try to provide a range of assignment types as part of the assessment process – so you might be asked to do presentations, posters, examinations or practical activities as well as written assignments. Chapter 7 explores some of these alternative assessment types – but for the most part this book focuses on written assignments.

Your course, therefore, will consist of carefully thought out aims which lead to learning outcomes for each module which will be assessed through the considered design of assessment activities – or assignments. There are rules that universities must follow to ensure that the assessments are assessed at an appropriate level; are the correct length (e.g. number of words) for the number of credits that will be awarded; and that they will enable students to demonstrate that they have met the learning outcomes – something we look at more closely in the next chapter. Chapter 8 looks at the ways in which feedback enables you to understand how well you are meeting those aims and outcomes and how to use it to improve your writing.

You can be absolutely sure that these assignments haven’t just landed at your door as a result of a passing whim of an individual tutor!

What are primary education assignments for?

In a primary education programme, the learning outcomes for each module will be about supporting you to become an effective primary school teacher – one who is confident to articulate their values, beliefs and rationale which underpin what they do in the classroom.

Contrary to what you might have heard (or maybe believe yourself), assignments are not designed simply as obstacles in your way to becoming a teacher – something that is an ‘add on’ to the real business of teaching. In the UK, teaching has long been a graduate profession (that is, you need to have studied to degree level to be awarded QTS) – and to most people that feels right. If you are going to teach others, you should surely be able to demonstrate your own ability to learn and engage at degree level. But degree-level study is hard – as it should be! If you are studying for a PGCE, some or all of your work will be assessed at masters level – and, as you would expect, this will require you to go up a gear from your undergraduate study.

If we went to the other extreme and teachers were not required to have any qualifications, nor to engage in any kind of academic learning, then anyone could be a teacher – and we know that that is not good enough for such an important profession. I have worked with many student teachers who have begun their teaching profession as unqualified teachers – they have perhaps started as classroom assistants and then been offered a teaching role. Or some have started as secondary school teachers and moved into the primary phase. Without exception, these students are hungry for access to the world of scholarly thinking and research which will help explain, support and clarify their experiences in the classroom. When they have not had access to the world of educational theory and learning they very much feel the lack and often have a far greater desire to engage with reading and writing about their teaching – because they understand how it can help them develop as teachers.

Assignments, if you let them, will:

• enable you to make links between theory and practice
• deepen your understanding of issues of teaching and learning
• help to make you a better teacher
• help you to get better at writing, understand the writing process better and therefore teach it better in the classroom
• develop your understanding of the teaching standards for QTS and how to meet them.

Linking theory and practice

Every teacher has a theory about learning and teaching. The way in which you conduct yourself in the classroom, the learning experiences you design for your class, the way in which you talk to children and how you help them when they don’t understand are all based on some kind of belief or theory. Do you believe that seating children with their friends will support or inhibit learning? Do you think that rote learning is important? Do you give children hands-on learning experiences? Do you think they need to practise reading every day?

Engaging critically with what knowledgeable others have to say about their own and others’ research and understandings about learning and teaching is how you will build on your own knowledge and understanding – your own theories and beliefs. If you are then able to understand how these fit within political, historical, social and international contexts you will have a strong foundation upon which to build your teaching career. Ultimately, you need to be sure of your reasons for teaching as you do so that you can have confidence that you are doing the best for the children you teach. When you do something without a real understanding of why you are doing it or where your belief comes from, you are far more likely to be pushed from pillar to post, feel less secure in your teaching and more likely to be swayed by the current fad or political imperative.

I asked these questions earlier:

• Do you believe that seating children with their friends will support or inhibit learning?
• Do you think that rote learning is important?
• Do you give children hands-on learning experiences?
• Do you think they need to practise reading every day?

Hopefully, your answers were ‘it depends’ – this is because you know just how complex being a primary school teacher is – and that you need to have access to lots of different ways of thinking about teaching and learning so that when it comes to the contextualised situations you find yourself in, you can adapt and respond with confidence, knowing that you have good reasons, carefully considered, for doing what you do.

Understanding issues in teaching and learning

As part of your writing you will have to read. If you select what you read carefully and engage with it fully (this is the focus for Chapter 4) you will find out about the issues that will affect you as a primary school teacher. In your reading you will find out about what is important, what is political, what is contested, as well as where there is consensus. You will begin to get a sense of the history of primary education, its manifestations in other countries, what its many purposes are (and therefore what your role as a teacher is) – and how it is hijacked, over-simplified, challenged and constricted. Your reading will demand that you are critical – you do not just look at the surface and accept whatever it is that anyone says about any issue. You will engage with debates, with dis-agreements, with passionate arguments for one approach or another as well as dispassionate reports on ‘how things are’ in primary education. You will distinguish between those who have powerful voices, well-informed voices, personal voices, biased voices and ill-informed voices – and you will be able to begin to add your voice to the conversations about the issues through your written responses.

Being a better teacher

Knowing about the links between theory and practice and understanding the issues involved in being a teacher must put you in a really good position to be an excellent practitioner. You will, of course, still need to demonstrate that you can do the job in practice and all that that entails – but unless you are informed you will only ever be able to stay within the boundaries of what you already know. The world of theory, of research, of knowledge enables you to move beyond those boundaries and extend what you know and can do for the children with whom you work.

Being better at writing and teaching writing better

Being able to write well is an important skill for a teacher – and, arguably, for life. Teaching is about communication and writing is a fundamentally important means by which we communicate. Writing assignments is about communicating your understanding, your beliefs about teaching and learning and convincing your reader that what you do in the classroom will be effective and informed. You can make the writing of assignments a means by which you work on your own writing – thinking of yourself as a writer in your own right. And as you work out how to be a good writer, you will be thinking about things that children need to know, too – and you will be able to empathise with the things that make writing difficult. While you won’t be teaching children how to write degree- or masters-level assignments you will be asking them to engage in the process of writing and you will want them to be able to express themselves clearly and confidently across a range of genres. Cremin (2006), among others (Graves, 1983; Calkins 1993; Gardner, 2014), has looked at the idea of ‘teachers as writers’ and argues that teachers who write themselves are much better able to help children in their writing in school. If you can learn how to look objectively at the writing process, and maybe even find pleasure in it, a whole world of writing and teaching writing will be opened up to you. Chapter 6 picks up on this idea in more detail, but throughout the book I want you to see how what you learn about reading and writing through doing assignments will be valuable for your classroom practice.

The teaching standards

As you will know, there are a set of ‘standards’ that all trainee teachers are required to meet in order to be awarded Qualified Teacher Status – you will have been given them as part of your paperwork for the programme.

The preamble to the standards states:

Teachers make the education of their pupils their first concern, and are accountable for achieving the highest possible standards in work and conduct. Teachers act with honesty and integrity; have strong subject knowledge, keep their knowledge and skills as teachers up-to-date and are self-critical; forge positive professional relationships; and work with parents in the best interests of their pupils.

You will see the call for strong subject knowledge and to keep knowledge and skills up to date – there is a deep and inextricable link between the teaching that you ‘do’ and what you know and believe – and the standards reiterate this throughout:

• demonstrate knowledge and understanding of how pupils learn and how this impacts on teaching (Standard 2: Promote good progress and outcomes by pupils)
• demonstrate a critical understanding of developments in the s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• The author
• 1 What are assignments for?
• 2 Getting started
• 3 Study skills
• 4 Reading academically
• 5 Constructing an argument Structuring
• 6 Writing academically Language, voice and style
• 7 Different kinds of assignments
• 8 Using feedback Developing your writing
• 9 Resources
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index