The context of this paper is the learning of beginning teachers in the training year and the subsequent first two years of their professional practice. Located within a three-year longitudinal study, it extends earlier work (Burn et al. 2000, 2003, Hagger et al. 2008) concerned with the learning of the same teachers during their year of postgraduate training. While highlighting the extent to which the student teachers attributed their learning to experience, our analysis also revealed significant variation among them in terms of their conception of the process of learning from experience. In order to make sense of this variation we developed a framework of five dimensions, according to which each student teacher’s approaches to learning from experience could be plotted along a continuum between two opposable orientations. The specific focus of this paper is the beginning teachers’ account of what they are learning in relation to one key aspect of their practice, namely their planning for pupil learning. In recent years, the quality of teachers and their teaching has been a focus of concern for governments in many countries. In England, The Professional Standards for Qualified Teacher Status (2007) published by the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA), can be seen as the culmination of successive UK governments’ efforts to raise standards in schools by promoting higher levels of expertise within the teaching profession. In relation to planning, the document states that those to be awarded qualified teacher status in England should: Plan for progression across the age and ability range for which they are trained, designing effective learning sequences within lessons and across series of lessons and demonstrating secure subject/curriculum knowledge (TDA 2007, paragraph Q22) Similar requirements, in terms of the competence that needs to be demonstrated by beginning teachers, exist across a number of European countries (Eurydice 2002) which indicates that planning is seen by a range of international regulatory bodies as being of primary importance in the formation of beginning teachers. Much of the emphasis in the literature on planning looks at approaches to and models of planning (see John 2006 for a summary). Our emphasis, however, is to examine not so much the process of planning but rather what it is that the teachers in our study are learning about planning as they move from their initial training through to the first two years in the profession as qualified teachers. The data presented in this paper relate to all three years of the study and draws on interviews with the 17 teachers for whom we have full data sets. Three research questions guided this phase of the analysis: 1. In each of the three years what do the student teachers claim they are learning in terms of planning? 2. How do these claims change, if at all, over the course of the three years? 3. What is the nature, if any, of the relationship between the student teachers’ planning for their pupils’ learning and the way that they plan for their own professional learning?

The data discussed in this paper were collected as part of a three year longitudinal study beginning teachers in England, following students on a one year secondary Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) course through their initial training and subsequently through the first two years of their teaching career. The aim of the study was to examine beginning teachers’ developing thinking and practice and to this end each of the participants was observed teaching and then interviewed to explore his or her thinking in relation to that specific practice. On four occasions in the PGCE year and on three occasions in each of the subsequent two years the beginning teachers were observed teaching a lesson, and then interviewed by the researcher who had observed it. The interview schedule, developed with reference to the approach used by Brown and McIntyre (1993), followed a basic agenda concerned with the student teachers’ perceptions of the lesson. Its purpose was to seek their thinking in relation to planning, conducting and evaluating that lesson, and their reflections on the learning that informed, or resulted from, the lesson. Within an overall phenomenological approach analytical categories were developed through an iterative, inductive process using transcribed data. Our previous analyses (Burn et al. 2000, 2003, Hagger et al. 2008) allowed us to map the substantive focus of the beginning teachers’ learning agenda over three years and to examine their conceptions of the process of learning to teach. In this paper cross-sectional analysis of the data enabled us to look changes over time, which we were then able to test and illuminate through individual case studies.

Emergent findings suggest that the foci of the teachers’ learning agenda, in relation to planning, changes considerably over the three years. In all three years, planning appears to feature more prominently as a focus for learning, than other categories, suggesting – particularly in the training year and the first year as a newly qualified teacher (NQT) – how important the pre-active phase of teaching is in their developing practice. Learning to plan more effectively (or efficiently) is seen as being as important to their progress as improvements in their interactive decision making. While some aspects of planning are clearly prominent in the training year it cannot be assumed that planning overall plays less of a role in subsequent years, although the nature of what it is that the beginning teachers are learning about planning does appear to change over time. Furthermore the way in which they plan for their pupils learning also has parallels with the way in which they approach their own professional learning and specifically how they may plan for that learning. The findings have a number of implications for teachers’ initial training and ongoing professional learning. The research indicates that drawing parallels between the way in which beginning teachers plan for pupil learning and the way in which they plan for their own learning may be helpful for both teacher educators and those responsible for qualified teacher induction.