Session Information
Contribution
The focus of this paper is the learning of beginning teachers in the first two years of professional practice. Located within a three-year longitudinal study, it extends earlier work (Hagger et al. 2006, 2007) 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 conceptions 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. Analysis of the student teachers' perceptions of the factors promoting or inhibiting their learning then allowed us to examine the interaction between their orientations to learning from experience and the context of that learning. While all the student teachers within the study had developed orientations which allowed them to learn effectively within the support structures of an initial teacher education programme, our contention, on the basis of the first year data, was that only those with particular orientations appeared particularly well equipped to go on learning as beginning teachers in new and diverse contexts. The purpose of this paper is to test that claim against the data from the second and third years of the study. In effect our central research question is: to what extent, or in what ways (if at all), do orientations to learning from experience developed during training predict approaches to professional learning as a beginning teacher?The data presented here relate to the experiences of 17 beginning teachers of English, mathematics and science (initially recruited from two secondary Postgraduate Certificate of Education partnership schemes) during their first two years of teaching. The overall approach to data collection and analysis was phenomenological. On three occasions a year each teacher was 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 initially concerned with the beginning teacher's perception of the lesson. Its first purpose was to seek the teacher's thinking in relation to planning, conducting and evaluating that lesson, and her/his reflections on the learning that informed or resulted from, the lesson. This was followed by more general exploration of their professional learning experiences at this stage in their development.The analytical categories, originally developed through an iterative, inductive process using data from the PGCE year, were tested against the data for years two and three of the study. Taking as our unit of analysis the learning trajectory of the individual teacher, we examine the nature and extent of their learning and the relationship between their orientations to learning from experience, and their perceptions of the contextual factors impacting on that learning. Our findings are illuminated through the use of three individual case studies.Our emergent findings suggest that orientations developed during the year of training persist and become increasingly important determinants of learning when the formal structures of a training programme are removed. This has profound implications for initial teacher education and induction, suggesting the need for as great an emphasis on the processes by which teachers learn and develop their practice as on the knowledge and skills that they need to acquire.Brown, S. & McIntyre, D. (1993) Making Sense of Teaching (Buckingham, Open University Press). Hagger, H., Burn, K. & Mutton, T. (2006), Making sense of learning to teach: the interaction of leaner identity and context. Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, Geneva 13-15 September. Hagger, H., Burn, K. & Mutton, T. (2007- under review), Practice makes perfect? Learning to learn as a teacher.
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