Transcript Professional Learning of Teacher Educators

Education
The demands, challenges &
expectations of Teacher
Education: Myth busting
John Loughran
Myth 1: Teaching looks easy
 Despite all that we know about teaching and learning,
‘teaching as telling’ and ‘learning as listening’ still pervades
public perceptions of practice.
 It is far too easy to assume that a teaching routine is all that
is needed to do teaching. A routine may be founded on a
skill base, but expertise is much more than skills alone and
it is expertise in teaching that is crucial to enhancing
student learning.
 Expertise requires an ability to frame practice it is not just
having a range of ‘activities that work’ on hand.
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Becoming a teacher educator
 Being a teacher educator involves much more than applying
the skills of school teaching in a new (and different) context:
My professional uneasiness continued. Clearly it became evident that I was
required to be more than a classroom teacher, although at that point, I was
not quite sure what the more meant. (Brandenburg, 2008, p. 5)
 Coming to see what teaching about teaching really involves is
challenging and not always straightforward:
Teacher educators are criticised for, and often critical of, being left on their
own, but they almost have to be left on their own to construct their own
professional knowledge of practice. At the same time, this does not mean
that every teacher educator needs to ‘start from scratch’, but it does require
them to transform their perspectives. (Berry, 2013, p. 19)
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Myth 2: Teacher education is just
teaching in a different context
 When teaching is understood as problematic, the
complex nature of practice is uncovered.
 If teaching is complex business, teaching teaching
must be at least as complex.
 Understanding teaching as a discipline reinforces
the importance of moving beyond simplistic views
of teaching and superficial views of teacher
education.
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Teacher educator identity
 What influences the development of an identity?
– What do we expect to do?
– How do we do it?
– How are knowledge and practice of teaching understood and
portrayed?
 How is the transition to being a teacher educator experienced?
– Murray & Male (2005) suggest it takes (at least) 3 years
– There is a sense of loss in moving from a leader in one field to a novice
in another: experiences of a change in nature of the teaching role
 Why does teacher education appear to suffer from low status?
– How teaching is valued impacts how teacher education is viewed
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Myth 3: Theory is only in the ivory tower,
practice is only in the swampy lowlands
 Donald Schön illustrated the place of reflection (in
and on practice), the importance of knowledge of
practice and how framing and reframing influence
the development of knowledge, understanding and
expertise.
 Just as there is a crucial symbiotic relationship in
teaching and learning so too there is with theory
and practice.
 Practice informs theory informs practice
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The nature of teacher education
 Teacher education is complex work involving curriculum,
pedagogy and research, yet most teacher educators are
provided with little professional development support or
mentoring in most teacher education programs … we are
expected to attend to, and experiment with, clinical aspects
of practice as teacher educators in order to develop into
skilled practitioners … At the same time, the academy
expects teacher educators to pursue rigorous programs of
research … While most teacher educators begin with a deep
commitment to effective teaching and pedagogical reform,
the culture of education colleges and the promotion criteria
and other reward systems within universities privileges
scholarship over clinical practice. (Gallagher, et al., 2011, p.
880)
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Negotiating the curriculum & change
 Is there/should there be, a teacher education curriculum?
 Although teacher educators may well be experienced
practitioners, their lack of academic experience (or perhaps
more pointedly, their perceived standing) can make it difficult
for them to have a ‘voice’ in the academy; especially when it
comes to challenging existing curricular conventions.
 The need to be able to negotiate the interplay between the many
conflicting, and sometimes contradictory, positions in academia
means that educational change can be very difficult indeed.
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Myth 4: The ‘practicum’ is the only place
where you learn to teach
 Professional experience matters but requires:
– Genuine partnerships that build on the
opportunities available through the different
educational environments
– Challenging the status quo
– Support in learning about teaching through
risk-taking
– Formative assessment should be well in
advance of summative judgment
– Creating conditions for learning
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Building up from principles
 Learning about teaching:
– involves continuously conflicting and competing demands;
– requires a view of knowledge as a subject to be created rather than as a
created subject;
– requires a shift in focus from the curriculum to the learner;
– is enhanced through (student) teacher research;
– requires an emphasis on those learning to teach working closely with
their peers;
– requires meaningful relationships between schools, universities and
student teachers; and,
– is enhanced when the teaching and learning approaches advocated in
the program are modelled by the teacher educators in their own
practice. (Korthagen, et al., 2006)
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Pedagogy of teacher education
 Teaching teaching is about thoughtfully engaging with
practice beyond the technical; it is about using the cauldron
of practice to expose pedagogy (especially one’s own) to
scrutiny. In so doing, collaborative inquiry into the shared
teaching and learning experiences of teacher education
practices can begin to bring to the surface the sophisticated
thinking, decision making and pedagogical reasoning that
underpins pedagogical expertise so that it might not only be
recognized, but also be purposefully developed. The result
being the creation of conditions for the development of
informed professionals who better understand, and are able
to articulate, the complex and sophisticated business of
teaching.
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 Teacher educators need to: reposition the attention of
students of teaching from the visible performance of
teachers’ work to the invisible work that supports it; resist
the temptation to give students all the answers so that they
learn to think and act in the face of uncertainty; and, create
shared spaces for the exploration and resolution of difficult
emotions without judgement (Forgasz, 2013).
 Learning to teach is demanding and complex work and that
view needs to be upfront and explicit in the ways in which
teacher educators conceptualize and enact their practice.
 Learning about the learning of teaching clearly requires
thoughtful, focused and meaningful professional
development opportunities for teacher educators.
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Research informed teacher educators:
 Knowing how to read, evaluate, critique, and use … research in their own work
… to be able to interpret new research studies by locating them within a larger
discourse that is informed by multiple historical, empirical, and epistemological
perspectives …
 Expertise in conducting research about their own practices and programs … self
examination and interrogation of the biographical bases of behaviour and beliefs
... conducting empirical research on practice in order to determine what the
outcomes of teacher preparation courses and field experiences are for
prospective teachers’ own learning, for their professional performances in
schools and classrooms, and for their pupils’ learning.
 Expertise in sorting out which questions about teacher education are empirical
and which are questions of values and beliefs. Questions of value cannot be
settled simply by assembling good evidence … these questions can be shaped,
reformulated, or understood more profoundly on the basis of evidence, but
evidence must always be interpreted (Cochran-Smith, 2005, pp. 224 – 225).
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Myth 5: The job of teacher Education is to
produce ‘classroom ready’ teachers
 Principals/schools naturally want teaching ready graduates,
how that might be achieved is not as simple as many would
like
 Learning to teach is more than just being familiar with the
requirements of a given curriculum
 Learning to teach does not stop at the end of the course
(such things as mentoring, support, collaboration &
researching practice shape and inform the nature of the
beginning teaching experience)
 Professional development serves a purpose, professional
learning creates a vision for growth
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Personal learning/public understanding
 Why do we struggle to be able to answer the
questions politicians tend to want answers to?
 What might we reasonably expect teacher
education to do for pre-service teachers?
 How capable are we of effecting educational
change?
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Self-study of Teaching and Teacher
Education Practices
 Inquiring into one’s own practice creates
opportunities to develop deeper understandings
of, and actions in, teaching and learning about
teaching
 Teacher educators’ knowledge and practice
should model a ‘vision’ for how growth and
development in teaching can progress
throughout a career
 Working collaboratively through self-study can
offer the learning challenges that catalyse
growth as a professional.
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Conclusion: A path to becoming
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Tackling the myths
Myth 1: Teaching is easy
Myth 2: Teacher education is about picking up the
tips and tricks of teaching
Myth 3: Theory and practice do not meet in teacher
education
Myth 4: You can only learn to teach in school
Myth 5: Teacher education is all about being
‘classroom ready’
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