DEVELOPING EDUCATIONAL PRACTICE

CRITICAL ISSUES

• Why call it teacher education?

• What is a disposition and why does it matter?

• Why do teachers need to go on developing?

• Why does development need to start early?

• Why is it not selfish to want a flourishing practice?

Education, not training: what's in a word?

Case study: Joe's lesson

Although it was a cold afternoon, the south-facing classroom was hot and stuffy. Eight Year-10 pupils were spread out amongst the tables for their Spanish lesson; two girls both called Sarah sat with the only two boys of the group, three girls sat at the table next to them and Clara sat at the furthest corner of the furthest table, with her head on her arms and her eyes closed. The student teacher had prepared a model lesson, full of good practice, moving from group activity to a series of competitive games using mini whiteboards, to the core of the lesson, which was 'improving written course-work'. But the pace of the lesson gradually slowed. The two Sarahs had ceased to bother, the boys had worked on a couple of their sentences, nobody seemed quite sure what the three invisible girls at the middle table had done, and Clara was sitting glaring at the two Sarahs. Joe, the student teacher, moved from pupil to pupil, encouraging, asking questions, showing, suggesting ideas, but the pace slowed even more and everybody seemed glad when the bell rang. When the pupils had left, Joe sat despondently on one of the tables. Before the lesson, Joe's school mentor Clare, Joe and myself, as Joe's university tutor, had had a conversation about the relative merits of the term 'teacher training' and 'teacher education'.

Clare: You have an idea of what teaching is about before you go into it, so it's not a case of being educated like a pupil ... You are trained, but your training would differ from school to school ... but I suppose the basics of teaching are the same ... What's expected is the progress in your class. Making progress, here anyway, is the cornerstone of every lesson. You train someone to do that. How are you going to do that?

Me: Well yes! Can you train someone to make a class of various kids from various places and various ages make progress?

Clare: Yes. That's what we're here for, isn't it, as teacher trainers?

Joe: I think training suggests there's a set way of doing it. If you do it that way, you always get results.

At the end of the lesson the conversation went like this:

Me: How do you train someone to deal with a class like that? Is it training or..?

Clare: No!

Joe: I think training someone is saying there is a set process, do it like that, then do it again and do it again ... but I don't think you can do it like that in a school. If you said, right, that's how you have to do it, the next lesson they come in and they'd all be fine